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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Argument
Message-ID: <3469@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 89 02:40:42 GMT
References: <10704@bcsaic.UUCP>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 29

From article <10704@bcsaic.UUCP>, by ray@bcsaic.UUCP (Ray Allis):
# ...
# Human "natural" languages are not symbol systems; nothing useful can be
# done with only the symbols.  It's the meanings that are important.
# Directly translating from the symbols of one language (e.g. English) to
# the symbols of another (e.g. Chinese) without recourse to denotations
# and connotations is nonsensical.  (This really isn't arguable, is it?)

It's not nonsensical at all.  Lots of people have had the experience
of translating an article in a language they don't know with a
dictionary.  Not fully, but for some types of articles you can
get most of the gist.  For that matter, when you use a dictionary
for your own language it's mostly just symbol-symbol correspondences
you're finding out about.  Though dictionaries do commonly have
some encyclopedic information, too.

I am not saying that full or even good translation can be done this way
-- just that sometimes, some sort of translation can.  And I'm not
saying this shows that natural languages are merely symbol systems.
Rather, I'm saying you can't show that they're not by appealing to the
supposed impossibility of symbolic translation.

# Thinking and understanding have to do with (non-symbolic) physical and
# chemical events in our central nervous system (brain).  ...

That can hardly be so, since such events can be taken as symbols
for the states of the world that evoke them.

		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu