Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:3623 comp.ai:6041 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!amdahl!kp From: kp@uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai Subject: Re: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince Message-ID: <0cWk02pp8aza01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> Date: 21 Feb 90 19:19:16 GMT References: <18883@bcsaic.UUCP> <1589@skye.ed.ac.uk> <11488@venera.UUCP> <1754@skye.ed.ac.uk> <11910@venera.isi.edu> Reply-To: kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA Lines: 62 Summary: In article qw0w+@andrew.cmu.edu (Quanfeng Wu) writes: >kp@uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: >> . . . Suppose you >>do show two ... grammars, with a semantics for the first that parallels >>the syntax of the second. How can you show that you got it right? You >>have to define the semantics in the first place! > > . . . In my example, I have the >assumption that meanings have been symbolized. And upon that >assumption, I have the claim that operation on semantics is just >manipulation on symbols. All information can be expressed and processed in symbolic form, whether it's about the syntax of a language, the semantics of a language, the positions of the planets, even whether John loves Mary. When you give an example of "symbolized" information, you have NOT shown either: 1) That the subject matter described by the information is symbolic or 2) That operations on the objects described are symbolic operations. >>Let me emphasize again that these are issues which Searle seems to >>completely ignore. He does not acknowledge that semantic information >can be encoded in a program at all. (I guess he's never compiled a >>program). What's important for us, in our discussions of Searle, is to >>avoid getting confused ourselves about which information is syntactic >>and which information is semantic. > >I really would maintain that the boundary between syntax and semantics >is very fuzzy. I had some experience of design a small language for the >purpose of real-time-control application; because that case dealt with a >very specific semantic domain, and from that experience I firmly believe >that the dividing line between syntax and semantics is arbitary; that >is, I could almost arbitarily put more and more semantics checking into >the syntax checker while designing the complier. This is a good example. When designing a compiler (or especially an interpreter) the designer has many options in assigning the syntactic and semantic processing to different modules. Frequently, the most efficient design will mix syntactic with semantic information. In the case of human language understanding, it seems assured that the overlap is almost complete. Overlap in *implementation*, that is. Let's look at another case: motion in two dimensions. As the Moon orbits the Earth, part of its motion is radial (toward or away from the Sun), and part of its motion is tangential. At all but four points in the orbit, the motion is mixed between the two directions. This does not mean that the motion does not have two separate components. Similarly, an parser may use semantic information extensively, but that does not mean that the semantic information is therefore syntactic. Take the sentence, "John and Mary had dinner, but she didn't eat much". The pronoun "she" refers to only one of the subjects. Which subject is mentioned is part of the syntax of the sentence, but semantic information about "she" and "Mary" will probably be used in the parse. It's still a matter of semantics that "she" refers to females, and "Mary" is a woman's name. > . . . syntax is a way of expressing partial semantics; . . . I agree with this.