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Article 2631 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Understanding and the Systems Reply
Message-ID: <4dPS4Q_00WBNA2Vtof@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 92 18:08:28 GMT
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 28

Daryl McCullough writes:

> (several paragraphs on a modification of the CR)
>
>Now, back to Searle's thought experiment. When the man says that he
>doesn't understand Chinese, he is simply saying that he doesn't know
>how to relate Chinese-concepts with those concepts he is more familiar
>with. In his case, these include not only English words, but also
>sense-impressions, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. This inability to
>relate concepts in different languages is all that is needed to
>explain why, subjectively, the man says that he doesn't understand
>Chinese. Searle's response to the Systems Reply does *not* show that
>there is a significant difference between the way the man understands
>English and the way he understands Chinese, only that the man can't
>relate the two.

Well, isn't this the crux of the matter?  Why he can't relate the
two is why Searle claims formal symbol manipulation is not adequate
for understanding. How do you program a computer so that it can 
understand Chinese (or English) the way we understand English?  
Remember, sense-impressions, smells, etc. still must be 
encoded symbolically (even if they are originally obtained
via sensors) and so their representations are *physically* manipulated 
in the computer the same way symbols for words of a language are.  What
intrinsic referential capacity could any of these symbols possibly have 
if *we* determine the encoding?

-Frank


