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Article 3055 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: orourke@unix1.cs.umass.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence Testing
Message-ID: <42139@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 92 12:28:09 GMT
References: <11722@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <42064@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1992Jan22.214347.6742@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
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In article <1992Jan22.214347.6742@aisb.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <42064@dime.cs.umass.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:
>>But the common meaning of "understand" is "to grasp the meaning of"
>>(Webster's 7th, definition 1a).
>
>So?

The point is that it is not necessary to establish self-awareness to
establish understanding:  we only need evidence for grasping.
And I believe this:

	[*] If a subject does not fully grasp the meaning of X,
	then there are a series of questions about X that will 
	reveal this.

Every teacher who has composed an exam believes this.  The flip side
of [*] is that if a long series of such questions are answered
correctly, our confidence that the subject does indeed grasp X
increases without bound.

In another post Jeff Dalton says:

>Moreover, neither the Turing Test nor conversation in general is
>all "observable consequences".  It's wrong to go from "there have
>to be observable consequences" to "there have to [be] conversational
>consequences".  

There may well be other observational consequences of understanding,
but because I believe [*], I believe the conversational consequences
are sufficient for empirically establishing undertanding.


