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Article 4634 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: orourke@unix1.cs.umass.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
Message-ID: <45216@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 92 23:10:14 GMT
References: <1992Mar19.011133.10015@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Mar20.142954.19624@cs.ucf.edu>
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Reply-To: orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
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In article <1992Mar20.142954.19624@cs.ucf.edu> 
	clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke) writes:

 >I think everyone is making it too complicated.
 >[...]
 >Putnam then goes on to talk about "an object S which ...behaves... exactly 
 >as if it had a certain description D."  The same mathematical identification  
 >technique can be applied to S to establish that it realizes input/output  
 >automaton D.   

This is a restatement of what Putnam says, yes.  But I'm still not sure
I understand it.  If you do, I would appreciate a rephrasing that makes 
it clearer.  If it says something definite, then there should be many
ways to make the same point; and the description could be fleshed out
with detail.  Not only is it unclear to me that an FSA with I/O
can be "realized" by a rock in any strong sense of "realize," it
is not even clear to me that realization is possible in the very 
weak sense that Putnam is using in his proof.

 >Putnam thus establishes that "functionalism" implies "behaviorism", 
 >so that if you don't like behaviorism then you won't like functionalism.

I agree with David Chalmers here:  "establishes" is far too strong a
word for what Putnam accomplishes in that Appendix.


