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Article #1130Re: Can humans "understand" mathematics?
From: William J. Rapaport
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1989 19:16
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1989 19:16
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In article <3120@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes: >.. I am struck by the similarity between the Chinese Room and how I felt in .. >mathematics classes. The .. instructor .. made squiggly marks, .. then >proceded to show the class a set of rules .. [to] transform the squiggly marks >into other squiggly marks. .. the symbols began to take on some kind of >*meaning* for me. .. I didn't just have the syntax, I started to obtain >semantics. When that occurred, I felt I was "understanding" mathematics. Precisely this analogy is discussed in: Rapaport, William J. (1986), ``Searle's Experiments with Thought,'' Philosophy of Science 53: 271-279 and in Rapaport, William J. (1988), ``Syntactic Semantics: Foundations of Computational Natural-Language Understanding,'' in J. H. Fetzer (ed.) Aspects of Artificial Intelligence (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers): 81-131
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!leah!bingvaxu!sunybcs!gort.cs.Buffalo.EDU!rapaport From: rapaport@gort.cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Can humans "understand" mathematics? Keywords: Chinese Room, Formal Symbol Manipulation, Physical Causation Message-ID: <14698@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> Date: 13 Dec 89 19:16:21 GMT References: <3120@uceng.UC.EDU> Sender: nobody@acsu.buffalo.edu Reply-To: rapaport@gort.cs.Buffalo.EDU.UUCP (William J. Rapaport) Organization: SUNY @ Buffalo Lines: 19