Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!ray
From: ray@bcsaic.UUCP (Ray Allis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Chinese Room
Keywords: words symbols
Message-ID: <10885@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 89 23:38:46 GMT
Organization: Boeing Computer Services-Commercial Airplane Support
Lines: 53


> From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
> Subject: Re: Chinese Room Argument
> 
> 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 originally wrote a reply thanking you for pointing out that translation is
possible without recourse to denotations; purely symbol to symbol.  But as I
think about it more, I think your example doesn't count as translation. It's
just a simple substitution code using words rather than characters.  Meaning
is still attached by a perceiver outside the process.

When I use a dictionary, it's almost never a symbol-symbol correspondence,
unless I'm looking for plural formation.  The dictionary problem always has
been "Where do you start?"  "What's the word for the notion of caretaker,
when used in the context of a guardian of a corporation's assets?"  "What's
the word for the center thing in a flower, that is the receiver of pollen
for fertilization?"  You can't look up a symbol by its *meaning*.

I had thought that the example of translation between two languages would
make my point most emphatically.  I actually take a stronger position; that
natural language is not the symbol set alone, that we think with the
referents, denotations, connotations ... and the tokens are just pointers and
handles for the experience we are really communicating.

> # 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.

Such events can be taken as *representations* of the states of the world
that evoke them, but symbolizing occurs only in minds as a subjective
experience.  

> 
> 		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu

Ray Allis  ray@atc.boeing.com   bcsaic!ray