From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff Thu Jan  9 10:34:25 EST 1992
Article 2587 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.logic
Subject: Re: Penrose on Man vs. Machine
Message-ID: <5925@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Jan 92 00:16:39 GMT
References: <1992Jan7.031553.24886@oracorp.com> <1992Jan7.105117.7193@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Jan7.191853.17310@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 18

In article <1992Jan7.191853.17310@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:

>It would save a lot of time and bandwidth if we first decided what is meant by
>'undertanding'. Is there an unambiguous definition of the notion of
>'understanding'? If there isn't one ('undertanding' being an intuitive
>notion) then most of the discussions here are pointless, since different
>people have different inutitions and everyone aruges about his own private 
>ideas pretending they all talk about the same thing. 

Actually, it would _waste_ a lot of time arguing about definitions
of understanding.

>In my opinion much of the Chinese Room discussion falls into this category.

One of the virtues of the Chinese Room is that it relies on our
ability to distinguish between languages we can understand and
ones we cannot, something we can do without much worry about how
"understand" in this sense is defined.


