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Article 4113 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <456@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 27 Feb 92 19:52:34 GMT
References: <1992Feb24.083303.20762@u.washington.edu> <1992Feb24.171942.10981@psych.toronto.edu> <450@tdatirv.UUCP> <1992Feb26.172245.10210@psych.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 42

In article <1992Feb26.172245.10210@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
|Of course there is. That's wy the distinction is universally held.
|Consider:
|   The boy kicked the ball to the girl.
|   A monster pinned the prince to the wall.
|
|They have the same syntax, but different semantics. Now consider:
|   Jack gave the box to the girl.
|   The girl was given the box by Jack.
|  
|They have the same semantics but different syntax.

So?  Both cases are fairly trivial to handle using a simple lexicon based
parser. (It does not even require any special I/O facilities).  Thus, either
computers are capable of semantics trivially, or Searle's argument relies on
a different definition of syntactic than is used by linguists studying natural
languages.  (I suspect the latter, as a computer scientist Searle is probably
using the definition of syntax used in formal grammar theory - which has
long been abandoned in the study of natural languages).

Semantics *is* distinct from syntax, but it is *not* obvious that it cannot
be *implemented* from a syntactic basis.  Derivation is not the same as
identity.  A living thing is not merely a bag of chemicals undergoing a
series of complex reactions, but that *is* how one is *implemented*.

Is it really so hard to concieve of something being more than the sum of its
parts?  Perhaps you have not studied enough biology - such phenomena are
universal in that field.

|It's very simple. What might you be on about?

But your examples are ones that have long been solved *in* *computers*,
so they do not in the least support Searle's position.

And such surface structural differences are easily handled in any of
Transformational Grammar or Relational Grammar or Functional Grammar,
or Generative Grammar, or ...  (all of which are implementable on
a computer).
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



