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From: ian@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: more Chinese Room
Message-ID: <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk>
Date: 12 Jan 90 01:50:46 GMT
References: <2602@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1527@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Computer Science CSMVAX, Liverpool University
Lines: 38

In article <1527@skye.ed.ac.uk>, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>                                                 How would I ever know
> that some Chinese symbol meant "tree", for example?
> 
You could see how it fitted with other symbols, how certain symbols appeared
together, how certain rules treated it.  You may not be able to say that you
would know what a *particular* symbol meant or which symbol meant *tree*, but
I am sure that you would eventually work out the meanings of *some* symbols.

>                                                 Just following the
> instructions wouldn't cause you to understand Chinese.  You'd have to
> at least do some extra work trying to figure things out.
>
I think that you would have to do extra work in order to *not* understand. As
you began to recognise rules, common groups of symbols, etc. you (or at least I)
would begin to reorganise the room to make life easier for myself. Since some
semantic knowledge is carried in the syntax of a language (for example cases in
German or particles in Japanese), this organisation would eventually lead you
to understand some of the meanings conveyed by some rules.

>                                                          If you think
> the man might be able to translate Chinese to English or to explain in
> English (or whatever his native language is) what someone said in
> Chinese, a much better test than asking him to reply to Chinese in
> Chinese, I'd like to hear any argument that makes that seem even
> remotely plausible.
> 
Rather than an argument, I will proffer an example of such a phenomenon.
From time to time, during human history, writings from long-extinct
civilisations have been found (for example Mayan codices, Runes or Egyptian
hieroglyphics).  All the information that the translators had to work with
were the rules they could deduce from the information.  With just this
syntactic knowledge, they deduced the semantic content.  Isn't this exactly
what Searle says cannot be done?  Code-breakers (for example Turing :-) must
have to do a similar task.

Ian Finch
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