From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!pindor Tue Mar 24 09:54:43 EST 1992
Article 4382 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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>From: pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Mar10.204754.1137@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Keywords: meaning, understanding
Organization: UTCS Public Access
References: <1992Mar5.001144.28065@beaver.cs.washington.edu> <1992Mar5.203720.4209@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar6.012217.25722@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Mar6.214616.18384@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 20:47:54 GMT

In article <1992Mar6.214616.18384@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>In article <1992Mar6.012217.25722@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>>
>>========  Understanding Understanding =============
>>
>>It seems to me that this discussion has become somewhat unproductive
>>because of non-agreement about the meaning of "understanding". Some
>>discussants assume that whatever "to understand" means, it is an
>>absolute, all or none attribute of a system.  Others say that it must
>>depend on something called "semantics" but aren't very clear about
>>what a semantic might be.
>
>[rest of the posting deleted.  See the original for the argument(?)]
>
>There seems to be a common misconception that the Chinese Room rests
>on some esoteric notion of "understanding," or that we have to analyze
>that concept to see what is going on in that situation.  As I (and others)
>have repeatedly argued, this is entirely wrong.  The confusion seems to
>arise because people want to determine how *from the outside* we would
>know if the CR understands.  This is the wrong approach.  The whole point
>of the CR argument is that *you* can actually carry out the computational
>operations *yourself*.  The question is, If you do this, will you understand
>Chinese in the way you understand other languages?  The answer is clearly "no."
>No special analysis of understanding is required.
>
Problem, which I have tried to point out in the past, is in the content of
the database for the Chinese squiggles. English word `hamburger` correlates in
the English person's mind for instance with a mental picture of hamburger - the
person had seen a hamburger in the past and knew this object was 'a hamburger'.
If the database for Chinese squiggles had a picture of hamburger correlated 
with the corresponding squiggle (and the same for other squiggles), would you
still maintain that the person would not understand what he/she is doing?
If you insist that the person has to `understand` what the squiggles represent,
you have to provide him/her with the same info about the squiggles as he/she
has about English words.

>I agree that the situation is sticky if we want an "objective" definition of
>understanding.  I agree that the concept is complex and not transparent.  But
>for the purposes of the original CR example, all of this makes *no* difference.
>
But the contents of the database does.
>
>- michael
>


-- 
Andrzej Pindor
University of Toronto
Computing Services
pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca


