Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!utility
From: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Do dogs love their humans (was: Can machines think....)
Message-ID: <2348@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 3 Mar 90 23:42:25 GMT
References: <2313@ritcsh.cs.rit.edu> <1990Feb19.165835.9673@pcsbst.pcs.com> <1990Feb27.162610.16639@comm.WANG.COM> <4030@cbnewsj.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 12

In article <4030@cbnewsj.ATT.COM> jwi@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ) writes:
>Language is exactly the point. The French have 47 words for love, the Eskimos
>have 47 words for snow, and the English language speakers have one word for
>think -- obviously, thinking is not a large part of our culture.
	That's not at all true.  My (very abridged) thesauraus gives
"meditate, reflect, conceive, hold, believe, judge, opine, cogitate, reckon,
ponder, consider, contemplate, imagine, fancy, regard" as synonyms for think,
so there is indeed a wealth of terms in english for congitive process.  Think
is a more general one.  And thinking is obviously a very large part of our
culture anyhow.  Western civilization has been built on thinking.  English
is currently the dominant language of that civilization.
		Ron