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Article 2892 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Is understanding algorithmic?
Message-ID: <a5VseB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 19 Jan 92 14:15:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: depsych.a5VseB2w164w
Lines: 31

Dudley Irish writes:
>Hopefully, up to now I haven't lost anybody and I haven't sent anybody
>running down the hall screaming "What an idiot!"  But at this point, I
>am going to make a sugestion that will probably get me into trouble.
>Let me suggest that one of the basic actions required for
>understanding is reference, the operation or action of refering to
>something.  Hardly any one denies that we can refer to objects in the
>real world (if it exists), things like hamburgers, cars, people, etc;
>lots of us believe we can refer to thoughts, ideas and plans, things
>that don't have space/time loci.  Some us of think we can refer to
>universals, wetness, hardness, etc.  Some think we can refer to
>events, WWII, the Spanish American War, etc.  For my purposes, it
>doesn't matter where you draw the line; all that matters is that you
>have some idea of how 'reference'/'refers' is used and what it means.

Isn't "reference" essentially a synonym for "semantics"?  Your
discussion of types of reference seems meant to include concepts
of semantics as word/object pairings (as conceived in logical
analysis) and word/signifieds pairings (as conceived in
structuralism).

>So let us turn to our Turing machine and see if we can explain to our
>skeptical philosopher how such a machine could refer to something.

So a Turing machine doesn't have semantics.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


