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Article 4225 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
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Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Message-ID: <EdgwVzO00Uh7Q40SVx@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue,  3 Mar 1992 13:42:07 -0500 
>From: Franklin Boyle <fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Definition of Understanding

Daryl McCullough writes:

>Come on, Jeff, do *you* believe that Steven Harnad has explained
>anything about understanding with his example in Hungarian? Is the
>meaning of "understanding" clearer to you now than it was before you
>heard Harnad's explanation?
> 
>I already knew that I didn't understand Hungarian (or Chinese, or
>Finnish, etc.) However, it is not obvious how to generalize from my
>subjective experience to something objective. And an objective
>definition is needed in order to say under what circumstances
>*another* being can be said to understand something.

Well, as a first step, let's say that every time a noun occurs in
one of the rules used to process the Chinese Room input, the person
in the room is required to draw an instance of that category.
I suggest this as a starting point for an objective analysis of
understanding because subjectively I seem to mental image a tree, 
for example, when I here or see the word "tree".  I feel that I 
"understand" (modulo the rest of the context) what is being talked 
about when this word comes up in a sentence in part because I am
able to mental image it, and given pencil and paper, 
I can draw it.  Unfortunately, I cannot say the same when I see 
and hear Chinese or Hungarian.  I do not mental image a tree when
symbols that are meant to designate it come up, and I would not be 
inclined to draw it.  I simply cannot get that information 
out of the structures of the symbols which are arbitrary with respect 
to those of their referents.

-Frank





