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Article 3128 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence Testing
Message-ID: <1992Jan24.183656.8799@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jan 92 18:36:56 GMT
References: <42064@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1992Jan22.214347.6742@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <42139@dime.cs.umass.edu>
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In article <42139@dime.cs.umass.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:
>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:

What I was objecting too, really, was this use of dictionaries.
It may be possible to dissolve philosophical disputes by considering
the meanings of words, but I don't think it works very well just to
look them up in dictionaries.  Dictionaries often get words wrong, 
especially if they're to some extent technical terms.  Moreover,
the people who argue well and whose articles I find most interesting
(IMHO, of course) are usually not among the dictionary-citers.
Since you are normally in the former category, I was disappointed
to see you turn up in the latter.

>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.

It's one thing to believe conversational consequences are sufficient,
and quite another to say they amount to everything observable.

There's sometimes a sort of bait-and-switch in these arguments,
where we're asked to conclude that there must be observational
consequences if we're going to have any way to decide the issue
(people forget that some things can be shown by argument) and
then this is taken as showing we should accept the Turing Test.
But no.  There have to be some additional arguments that show
that particular observations of the TT do what's needed.

-- jd


