From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!cam Tue Jan 28 12:15:39 EST 1992
Article 3000 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle and the Curse of the Mediocre Philosophers
Message-ID: <16890@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 22 Jan 92 17:33:04 GMT
References: <FN6qeB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Organization: Edinburgh University
Lines: 91

In article <FN6qeB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:

I nominate Richard Carlson for the 1992 Chinese Toilet Award. This is
awarded to the poster on the topic of the Chinese Room who posts the
most words on the topic without having read any Searle. Obviously we'll
need to wait out the rest of 1992, but RC is clearly a very powerful
contender who is going to be very hard to beat.

>A good example of these philosophical felonies is
>John Searle's Chinese Room.  After several weeks of heated
>discussion and tortuously analytic reasoning, everybody seems to
>be coming to the conclusion that the Chinese Room proves nothing
>at all.

First, do not forget that most of those writing to this group about
Searle's Chinese have, like yourself, not actually read any of Searle's
writings on the topic. Second, quite apart from this serious disability,
I would also hesitate to presume that the readership of this group
constituted a definitive philosophical or AI forum. Most of them just
come here for the booze :-) Third, it is far from the case that
everybody is coming to the conclusion you suggest.  There is at least a
large minority who would disagree, among their number some of those who
have actually read most of what Searle has written about the Chinese
Room.

>It took a month for everybody to realize that Searle has _assumed_
>the passing of the Turing Test.

We have had a Chinese Room war at least every year ever since Searle
first proposed the argument. This particular group was started partly to
take the Chinese Room wars out of comp.ai. It always takes at least a
month to teach those who haven't read anything Searle wrote some of the
important elementary points.

> ... it is because he is a mediocre philosopher.  That adjectival
>qualifier is important.  Not just that John Searle is a
>philosopher, but that he is a *MEDIOCRE* philosopher.

This is a moot point. There is no doubt, however, that he is a very much
better philosopher than you. For example, he would not presume to pass
such a judgement on another philosopher of whose writings he had not
read one word.

>By eliding the question of whether a computer constructed on the
>lines of today's computers could in fact pass the Truing Test, and
>how they might go about doing it, and jumping ahead to an imagined
>day when they have done so (with no real or philosophically
>relevant consideration of the way they might have done so except
>the guess that it would be something like Roger Schanks's
>narrative indexing procedure -- which guess, as I have mentioned,
>no one has even picked up on),

Like many of those who haven't read Searle, you have completely failed
to understand why he brings in the Turing Test or presumes (for the sake
of argument) that it has been passed. See for example the many past
postings of Jeff Dalton who has spent a lot of time heroically trying to
correct this kind of ignorance.

>My point is, what we call "philosophical" thought is not "logical"
>thought, it is "semantic" or phenomenological thought.  That's
>what we mean by calling "philosophical" thought "reflective."  As
>such it is inherently non-algorithmic (even when it is being used
>to create algorithms!), so it can lead either to brilliant
>insights or to garbage and there is not algorithmic or
>deterministic decision procedure to judge any sample of
>philosophical thought (any philosophical "text," since reflective
>or phenomenological thought is inherently and irredeemably
>_textual_, i.e., "semantic"), leading to the conclusion that
>philosophical thought must be judged pragmatically and
>heuristically by the conclusions and findings to which it lights
>the way.

Your reasoning and expression are very confused. I suggest you consider
reading some good writing (e.g. Searle, who is also a very much better
_writer_ than you are).

>Kristoffer Ericksson writes:
>>Apparently some claim that the Chinese Room would still not have "real"
>>understanding, even it it were to pass this test (which of course IS the
>>famous Turing test), since Searle has "showed" that it can't have that.
>
>This is wonderfully clear and succinct.  But it took a month to
>get here!

It would have taken a lot less time if those who hadn't read any Searle
had refrained from posting their half-baked second-hand speculations as
to what he might have meant and had read a few papers instead.
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205


