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Article 4194 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Mar2.190455.17079@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 2 Mar 92 19:04:55 GMT
References: <1992Feb29.162020.9271@psych.toronto.edu> <44140@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1992Mar2.172515.15389@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 26

In article <1992Mar2.172515.15389@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>test. We are now, under the TT, expected to say that he understands
>Chinese.  If you ask him, however, he says he doesn't understand
>Chinese but, rather, that he's just executing these rules about
>symbol manipulation. To put the point bluntly, the Chinese symbols

  and

>implications of this move at all. I see no way of interpreting this move
>other than as a patently ad hoc attempt to shore up a flagging hypothesis.

 It is not difficult to take a reasonably bright 10 year old, and teach him
the manipulations of the Euclidean algorithm for computing greatest common
divisors.  And you can do so as a purely mechanical operation.  If asked,
he would answer that he knows nothing about greatest common divisors or
how to compute them.  Yet clearly the system does.

 You will doubtless say that the analogy is flawed.  I agree.  It is flawed
because the Euclidean algorithm is simple enough to be learned by a human,
whereas the CR algorithm is not.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


