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From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Can humans "understand" mathematics
Message-ID: <1696@uwm.edu>
Date: 30 Dec 89 05:10:18 GMT
References: <3120@uceng.uc.edu> <130200002@peg>
Sender: news@uwm.edu
Reply-To: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Lines: 47

In article <130200002@peg> ggast@peg.UUCP writes:
> I agree entirely that Searle is missing something.Everyone who has 
> learnt  a foreign language will know immediately what I  mean.When 
> you  start learning a foreign language your thought process is  in 
> your  mother  language,...

I take issue with this.  When I learned Hungarian, I learned it on its own
terms.  More generally, the language is taught there to foreign students using
a text written entirely in Hungarian.

The results are what makes that nation the world's leader in language teaching.

The difficulty you experience are undoubtedly a by-product of the way foreign
language has traditionally been taught.

> Once  you  have practiced the foreign language  or  piano  playing 
> enough    the   translation   process   becomes   automatic    and 
> subconscious...

Therein lies the issue, there were frequently occasions where I could say
or read something in Hungarian and yet not know how to translate it into
English, though I knew what it meant.  Obviously my understanding of the
language did not derive from my understanding of my first language -- not
even from day 1.

Furthermore, there are often occasions where I use words in my own native
language, English, where I do not know their meaning but know exactly what
situation fits the word and just happen to use it where it's appropriate.

Language understanding is a process whereby language is "compiled" into real
or imagined neural-muscular and sensory signals.  You train the mind in the
knowledge of a language by establishing links between the most abstract
concepts, through the intermediate concepts, ultimately down to the base-level
concepts which are our subroutines for controlling our basic bodily functions
and signal processing (including vision).

There is a hierarchy in abstraction here that you progress through, and if you
are taught different aspects of a language in the wrong order your progress is
going to be greatly impeded and you'll end up having to compensate by
resorting to techniques such as "interpreting" the language in your native
tongue.  If you are taught the language abstracted away from the context of
its use (i.e. in the "disembodied state") the same effects likewise will result,
because the bottom-most level has to be "concretized" in terms of actual
base-level experience.

That's the lesson taught by my experience and numerous other experiences
of mine and of other people that I have observed.