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Article 2794 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: dirish@math.utah.edu (Dudley Irish)
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Sender: news@math.utah.edu
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1992 19:19:59 GMT
References: <5949@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan12.214251.21761@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
	<DIRISH.92Jan14103326@jeeves.math.utah.edu>
	<1992Jan14.202806.29986@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu's message of 14 Jan 92 20: 28:06 GMT
Organization: Department of Mathematics, University of Utah
Message-ID: <DIRISH.92Jan16121959@jeeves.math.utah.edu>

> I said:
>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.

# David Chalmers said:
# The recipe, qua marks on paper, is certainly a syntactic object.
The marks on the paper are not the recipe.  They are a representation
of the recipe.

# As interpreted by a human, it has semantic properties (dervied from the
# semantics of the human).
See above.  The recipe is meaningless (has no semantic content) if it
is not interpreted.  It is improper (a category mistake) to speak of
the recipe as being un-interpreted.

# But one can say the same for a program.
We like to think of our programming languages as formal languages, but
I agree, we are mistaken when we do.

# 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.
This is a wholly unjustified claim.  You may believe that cooking from
a recipe is automatable, but it is not automatable in principle.  If
it were automatable in principle then you would be able state the
principle in which it is automatable and this whole debate would end.

# (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.)
If we formalized the recipes into a formal language then they would
not be written in a natural language, they would be written in a
formal language.  Again, I ask, could we please keep strait the
difference between a formal language and a natural language.

Dudley Irish
--
________________________________________________________________________
dirish@ced.utah.edu, Center for Engineering Design, University of Utah

The views expressed in this message do not reflect the views of the
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