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Article 2526 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Virtual Person? (was re: Searle and the Chine
Keywords: personal identity
Message-ID: <5893@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 7 Jan 92 19:37:29 GMT
References: <1991Dec15.023122.6582@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec16.181202.526@cs.yale.edu> <1991Dec16.163345.6653@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec18.200619.29195@cs.yale.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 26

In article <1991Dec18.200619.29195@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott) writes:

>I think Putnam has gotten off too easy so far.

>I see all this as more of a "mea culpa" by Putnam than a theorem.

Perhaps.  Putnam does seem to have changed his mind on some
issues as a result of the thinking that goes with the theorem
("the Skolemization of everything", as he says in "Models and
Reality"); hence his "internal realism".

But one of the views he has eventually dropped is functionalism;
and can it really matter not at all to AI if functionalism is
wrong?

>   And formal semantics sheds little light on how a creature
>living in the same world with George Bush could come to manipulate
>symbols that refer to him.  Presumably explaining how that happens
>would require following causal chains that take us out of the realm of
>model theory.

Putnam, however, disagrees with the idea that reference is just
a metter of having the right causal chain.  (Or at least that's
how I remember it.)

-- jeff


