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From: liny@clu.cf.ac.uk (Yuen Lin)
Subject: Re: Dennett on pain (was Does AI make philosophy obsolete?)
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Date: Thu, 14 Sep 1995 12:33:13 GMT
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In article <435v8v$1qg@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> A.Sloman writes:
>jmc@Steam.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) writes:
>
>> My opinion is that the concept of pain will survive a good theory of
>> mind.
>
>Yes. It will be like the survival of ordinary concepts of `water',
>`iron', `force', `energy' etc. alongside the technical concepts
>based on current theories of the architecture of matter. 

>But scientists studying water, iron, etc. are no longer confused by
>the pre-scientific semantics of the concepts.


There is a detailed account for the relationship between commonsense
meaning and scientific meaning of words like "water" in THOUGHT AND
LANGUAGE by J. M. E. Moravcsik (1990) (especially Chapter 6). He outlined
a lexical theory of language, and proposed that every word has
a meaning structure, which is capable of providing different layered
explanation of the meaning of the word. The meaning structure can
also explain why our knowledge of things (intesions, roughly) has
changed, but our referents of the words (extensions roughtly) have
remained the same (That is, "water" is still "water", no matter
how far science progresses).

Anybody interested in this discussion may want to have a look at the book.



Yuen

 



