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>From: zeleny@widder.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan21.182524.7880@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 21 Jan 92 23:25:23 GMT
References: <1992Jan18.134742.4155@oracorp.com> <1992Jan20.182835.5307@spss.com> <1992Jan21.191924.18205@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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Nntp-Posting-Host: widder.harvard.edu

I can't understand how this thread ever managed to get so far without
considering a very basic problem, that of context dependence of indexicals,
including pronouns, demonstratives, anaphora, and tensed verbs.  Given this
consideration, it is easy to see that the truth-value of the predicate "X
is a meaningful Chinese sentence" depends not only on the sentential
antecedents of X, but also on the concrete non-linguistic context of the
entire discourse.  Thus the notion of a predefined table of meaningful
conversations is inherently unrealizable, being that the infinitely
variable context can't *in principle* be fixed in advance.  In this way,
the problem reduces to that of reference, for even if you equip your
artificial speaker with any number of sensors estabilishing a putative
connection between the content of its sentences, the operational success of
such connection will depend on the machine's capability of synthesizing a
single representation of an external object on the basis of infinitely
variable quasi-phenomenal data caused by its presence.  Since I have
previously discussed ad nauseam the intractability of this problem by
algorithmic means, I trust that the readers will excuse me from making
further arguments to that effect.

`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'
: Qu'est-ce qui est bien?  Qu'est-ce qui est laid?         Harvard   :
: Qu'est-ce qui est grand, fort, faible...                 doesn't   :
: Connais pas! Connais pas!                                 think    :
:                                                             so     :
: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
: 872 Massachusetts Ave., Apt. 707                                   :
: Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139           (617) 661-8151            :
: email zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu or zeleny@HUMA1.BITNET            :
:                                                                    :
'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`


