Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Fallacy in Chinese Room experiment. Summary: What need defining is not "understanding," but "symbolic" Message-ID: Date: 15 Mar 89 04:49:27 GMT References: <1059@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <805@htsa.uucp> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 36 fransvo@htsa.uucp (Frans van Otten) of AHA-TMF (Technical Institute), Amsterdam Netherlands writes: " Finally I understand what you mean by "symbolic" vs. "non-symbolic". With " "symbols" you mean the (representations of) (English) words, and so with " "symbolic" you mean something (some concept or whatever) representated using " those symbols (words). With "non-symbolic" you mean something _not_ " representated by words, but some other way. I fully agree with the idea. " I wrote: understanding requires representation in _internal_ symbols. What " I mean by "internal symbols" is what you mean by "something non-symbolic". No, I'm afraid it's somewhat more complicated than that. Since a lot of the discussion of Searle's Argument depends on a clear grasp of what Searle (and most of his opponents) mean by "symbolic," "symbol manipulation," etc., I will in a separate posting venture a definition of a symbol system based on what I've gleaned from what the computationalists and symbolic functionalists (Turing, Newell, Pylyshyn, Fodor) seem to mean by symbolic. We have to make some commitment about what is and is not symbolic, otherwise there is no basis for agreeing or disagreeing about Searle's Argument or any other statement about what symbol crunching can and cannot do. One trivial gambit several contributors periodically resort to in this discussion is to call every physical process "symbolic." This collapses the substantive issues under discussion here concerning strategies of mind-modelling into an empty generality about materialism (which neither Searle nor I would bother to disagree with). (In other words, what needs defining is not "understanding," as many of my interlocutors have kept insisting, but "symbolic.") -- Stevan Harnad INTERNET: harnad@confidence.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu harnad@princeton.uucp BITNET: harnad@pucc.bitnet CSNET: harnad%princeton.edu@relay.cs.net (609)-921-7771