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Article 5697 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@ca3 (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Mean thoughts on what meaning means
Message-ID: <1992May16.055129.6377@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Date: 16 May 92 05:51:29 GMT
References: <1992May16.030044.13157@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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  Let me suggest a somewhat different way to think about
meaning.

  There are quite a number of systems in nature, including
organisms and many complex machines, whose behavior is more
easily explainable in terms of its consequences than in terms
of its antecedents.  We tend to say that the behavior occurs
"in order to" bring about the consequences.  Let's use the
word "teleological" to characterize such a system.

  Note that, if reductionism is correct, calling a system
teleological is an admission of ignorance, because if we
knew *enough* about any system, its behavior would be
perfectly explainable in terms of antecedents.  However,
one could still more or less objectively speak of a system
as being teleological at a certain level, in the sense that,
given only that level of knowledge about the system, its
behavior is more strongly correlated with the observed
consequences than with the observed antecedents of the 
behavior.

  I suggest that it only makes sense to speak of "meaning"
in teleological systems, and that a symbol has meaning if
its value is better correlated with consequences than with
antecedents.  

  In this way of speaking, the symbols in SHRDLU have meaning
at the level of ordinary human interaction with the program,
but they do not have meaning at the level of the binary
executable code.

	-- Bill Skaggs

(Note:  My Email address may appear incorrectly or not at
all in the header.  (New News software.)  My correct address
is bill@nsma.arizona.edu.)


