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Article 2637 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: My Understanding of Understanding
Message-ID: <kdPSPeO00WBN02VvRF@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 92 18:33:14 GMT
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 23

Leo Marcus writes:

>According to the above falsifiability property, feelings of understanding
>can turn out to be false.  It is also my opinion that very few things are
>*really* understood by anyone. (There must be some official philosophical
>name for this opinion.)

The "understanding" Searle refers to is the *kind* of understanding that
humans experience.  Your discussion assumes this kind of understanding.
What Searle is claiming is that computers don't have it and that whatever
understanding we attribute to them is merely interpreted or requires a
different notion of understanding than that which we experience.

The reason I thought up the "Nonsense Room" (described awhile back) was
to get some handle on human understanding with respect to the so-called
understanding claimed for the CR by the Systems Reply supporters.  The 
idea was to present a situation for which, by definition, there was no 
understanding to be had (the symbols never even had any intended meaning) 
and then compare it to the CR to see if there were any differences.  That
way there wouldn't be any confounding interpretations on our parts.  I
couldn't see any differences.  If you can, let me know.

-Frank


