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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Sci. American AI debate: No Contest
Summary: when debate degenerates into performance
Keywords: Searle Churchland Speed Hard-core-Searlean
Message-ID: <11274@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 90 15:54:18 GMT
References: <12679@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <18053@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 55

In article <18053@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> hougen@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Dean Hougen)
writes:
>
>Keith Gunderson, here at the U of MN is quite the same way.  His course here
>on minds, brains, and machines seemed 90+% nonsense to try to get you to
>accept his positions regarding the Searle-battle.  I went into the course
>knowing a good deal about the subject matter, (having had a similar course
>taught by an excellant prof. named Bill Robinson at Iowa State University)
>and quite excited about getting the chance to argue the ins and outs of the
>Searle-battle with one of his followers.  But instead I got someone who
>would rather joke about Searle's opponents than to discuss rationally their
>or Searle's positions.

It should come as no surprise that Searle, himself, behaved pretty much the
same way when he led a seminar at UCLA last year.  The rabbit punches came
fast and furious there, as if to encourage the audience to add there own.
(I still have no idea who in the audience thought he was making a contribution
by attacking LISP for its parentheses, but that will give you an idea of the
sort of arena that Searle now fosters and probably encourages.)

My own feeling is that David West has done the best job so far of putting a
finger on where the problem lies.  He made the observation that we are trying
to use the word "understanding" as if it denotes some entity which is
boolean-valued, atomic, veridical, and static.  Any of these properties
may be open to question.  After all, a good deal of Wittgenstein's
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS was devoted to questioning whether or
not those properties could be applied to a denotation of the word
"game."  If we can't get out of the woods with an apparently simple
word like "game," are we not a bit arrogant to assume that we have
a grasp on a word like "understanding?"

This is ultimately one of the messages of Minsky's SOCIETY OF MIND (although I
do not think that Minsky was able to summarize the position as well as West
did).  There is no reason to assume that all the words we use admit of
denotations as simple as those for words like "circle" or "square."  Words
like "understand," "learn," and "self" are particularly deceptive and are
the last sorts of objects which should be tried by the courts of our
intuitions.  The last time this argument erupted, it was because I accused
Searle of playing fast and loose with his terminology, at which point Stevan
Harnad took extreme umbrage.  Since then, I have seen nothing to persuade me
to change by position.  Instead, I have seen a better characterization than
I could provide as to what would involve treating one's terminology with more
respect.

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"For every human problem, there is a neat, plain solution--and it is always
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