From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo Mon Mar  9 18:33:46 EST 1992
Article 4130 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Xref: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca comp.ai.philosophy:4130 sci.philosophy.tech:2194
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo
>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Feb28.164842.12374@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Feb23.015634.9079@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Feb23.225938.17078@ida.liu.se> <1992Feb28.064104.9265@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1992 16:48:42 GMT

In article <1992Feb28.064104.9265@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@brauer.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>In article <1992Feb23.225938.17078@ida.liu.se> 
>c89ponga@odalix.ida.liu.se (Pontus Gagge) writes:
>
>PG:
>>(iv) Mr. Zeleny & co' abjectly fail to understand the Systems Reply.
>

I can only assume that I am being included in the "& co." here. While
I am in a certain amount of sympathy with Mikhail (why does every one
call him Mr. Zeleny, anyway?) on this issue, and I have been amused
(even if it is unpopular to admit so) by his parries and thrusts, neither
I nor he, I suspect, think of me as being in his "company" (Though
Toronto often likes to think of itself as akin to Harvard, an opinion
on which I have no opinion.)

As for abject failure, I must confess to a certain amount of depression over
the abject failure of terminology which seems to plague all discussions
of the Chinese Room. Arguments over the basic elements encompassed by
ordinary terms such as syntax and semantics bore me.  (Not that
discussion of powerful theories of syntax and semantics do.)  We never seem
to get the the real crux of the matter. We always seem to be emroiled in
guerrilla skirmishes over terms that are used uncontroversially in any upper 
level  undergraduate philosophy course.  Not, I might add pre-emptively, because
philosophers are inherently vague or somesuch nonsense, but
because the terms are part of the basic vocabularly of carrying on such
discussions  -- they label the basic distinctions underlying discourse
itself. Perhaps it is the aims of philosophical
debate, rather than the Chinese Room in particular, which underlie the
current, and ongoing, failure at communication.
-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
---------------------


