Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!xanth!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aipna!edai!cam
From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Understanding involves Learning?
Message-ID: <319@edai.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Mar 89 18:29:47 GMT
Reply-To: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 31

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the Chinese Room, and
whether purely syntactic processes could understand, or even appear to
understand. In the course of this Stevan Harnad has argued that the kind
of linguistic competence needed to pass the Turing Test couldn't be
possessed by anything short of a creature potentially capable of passing
the Total Turing Test, i.e., a creature "living" in the real world, with
sensors, effectors, and no doubt, a personal history. If I have grasped
his argument properly, this is because convincing linguistic competence
will require the kind of complex internal mechanisms inevitably involved
in handling rich sensors in a capable way; the mechanisms involved in
"symbol grounding" as it is often called, although it is the whole
syntactic mechanics which needs grounding, not just the symbols.

In other words (and not as simply as these few words suggest),
convincing linguistic competence requires semantics as well as syntax.

My question is this. Does convincing linguistic competence involve
learning? For it seems to me that one of the things that happens in
human conversations is that, in many trivial little ways, in hints,
metaphors, negotiations, etc., both parties are offering one another
opportunities to learn, even trying to teach. Sooner or later a
conversational robot which couldn't learn new ideas would be suspected
of being a metal-head.

To approach it from another direction: does understanding involve
learning?

-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK