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Article 2710 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1992Jan14.202806.29986@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 92 20:28:06 GMT
References: <5949@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan12.214251.21761@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <DIRISH.92Jan14103326@jeeves.math.utah.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 24

In article <DIRISH.92Jan14103326@jeeves.math.utah.edu> dirish@math.utah.edu (Dudley Irish) writes:

>As long as the recipe is written in a natural human language it is
>emphatically not a syntactic object, whatever one of those is.  Lets
>try and keep straight the difference between formal languages and real
>languages.

The recipe, qua marks on paper, is certainly a syntactic object.  As
interpreted by a human, it has semantic properties (dervied from the
semantics of the human).  But one can say the same for a program.  The
point in common between recipe and programs is that even when treated as
syntactic objects, there exist implementation procedures (automatable, in
principle) that lead from the syntax to a real physical system.

(If your point solely concerns the looseness and fuzziness of natural
language, then fine.  I could argue that the same point about syntax
and interpretability goes through, but the easiest thing to do is
to imagine recipes formalized into a language that lacks this looseness.
The recipe/cake argument goes through regardless.)

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


