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Article 2338 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Machine Translation (was re: Searle's response to silicon brain?)
Message-ID: <1991Dec21.000014.6836@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 91 05:00:13 GMT
References: <40822@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1991Dec18.172040.3506@spss.com> <45303@mimsy.umd.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <45303@mimsy.umd.edu> kohout@cs.umd.edu (Robert Kohout) writes:

>       [...]              if someone in this debate sees how
>the correctness of Searle's position in any way implies that,
>for example, we will never be able to engineer a fully automatic,
>high quality machine translator I wish they'd explain it

Simple.  Correct translation is a matter of finding an approximate synonym;
synonymy is a semantic relation; if machines can't compute semantic
relations, they can't translate anything.

The fact that semantic relations are non-recursive is a direct consequence
of G\"odel's Second Incompleteness theorem.  In any language containing
elementary arithmetic, as well as a recursive semantic relation "...
expresses ...", we may apply the arithmetization trick to the said relation
with predictable results.

>                                                           in a
>way that I could understand.

Sorry, but I can't be responsible for that.

>Bob Kohout

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