🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <11274@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) writes:

>In article <18053@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> hougen@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Dean Hougen)
>writes:

>>                                         . . . 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. . .


I'll second that!  I saw Searle giving essentially this very paper at Concordia
University a few years ago.  At the time I was enrolled in a Philosophy of Mind
course at McGill which was taught by a guy named Charles Travis, a classmate
of Searle's from Berkely.  So naturally, I went expecting at least some good
food for philosophical thought.  Instead, what I saw was Bob Hope meets
Wittgenstein - a smattering of philosophical allusion bolstered by much
irrelevant humour when the going actually got rough.


Speaking of Wittgenstein, . . .

  [Searle's argument trades on attributing certain semantic properties
   to the word "understanding" which are unintuitive and/or unsupported.
>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?"


Wittgenstein's target, in both the family resemblance and private language 
arguments, was a long standing philosophical tradition to the effect that
ALL bits of language admit to a (simple enough to be useful) semantic
reduction - Empirical Positivism.  Wittgenstein offered a radically different
view of how we come to acquire  language, and so also of what we, as the one's
who USE it, can say ABOUT it  (especially about MENTAL terms, like
"understanding").

I would be the first to cite these arguments in support of the idea that 
machines, that is artifices, can (in principle) think, at least as well as
we can digest pizza.  (A small taste of Searle's desperate wit).  But
Wittgenstein did NOT question that we can and do reliably USE linguistic
terms.  Just Because they don't lend themselves to criterial analyses does not
 imply that we don't "know what they mean", at least insofar as we seem to
 communicate adequately with them (albeit after much effort, at times...).
That is why Searle can indeed help himself to the term 
"understanding" without defining it.  Of course, if he implicitly uses it
as having semantic properties which no one else thinks it does, as is charged,
then he still has to give a good defense of his analysis of the term (which
he doesn't).

I think that the best way to get at Searle's dubious assumptions about
certain mental predicates is not to demonstrate how they don't fit well
with the human evidence, but instead to reveal how they don't fit any BETTER
with the MACHINE evidence than several alternatives might.  It seems that
Searle designed his Chinese Room with the following target in mind:  Anyone
who thinks that a computer could ever think or understand anything must be
committed to maintaining that it is the computer's CPU which is doing the
thinking, or understanding, or whatever.  Advances in PDP architectures
provided the first hint that, yes, although a Turing Machine can emulate
anything, that does not mean that its SYNTACTIC components, ie., tape states
(or transistor states), are SEMANTICALLY interpretable as having the same
macro-properties as that which it computes.

Does that mean that the room as a whole knows Chinese?  Well, it sounds
pretty absurd to me.  Rooms don't know anything, right?  (See?  We can 
discard BLATANT abuses of language without an accurate analysis to back us
up.  We just have to agree that they sound stupid.)  But that doesn't mean that
the only alternative is to presume that a computer and its CPU are semantically
indistinguishable.  Here I think that the details of the case are too 
simplistic to even give an "in principle" representation of exactly what is at
issue.

In short, Searle's argument, if we are to interpret it charitably as being one,
succeeds quite well in discrediting a certain philosophical stance towards
machines - but it is a stance that is far from monopolizing current research,
and one which I hope is not to widespread among those of us who would love to
make, among other things, a machine that could speak Chinese.

=================

 - Chris Robertson          Don't look back.  You may trip and hit your head.