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Article 4407 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Keywords: meaning, understanding
Message-ID: <6384@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Mar 92 17:03:18 GMT
References: <1992Mar6.012217.25722@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Mar6.214616.18384@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar10.204754.1137@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
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In article <1992Mar10.204754.1137@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>In article <1992Mar6.214616.18384@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:

>>No special analysis of understanding is required.

Are there any published discussions of Searle that have such a problem
with the word "understanding"?  I haven't noticed it in the things I've
read.  Is there really a big mystery about what "understand Chinese"
means?

It seems to me that the anti-Searle side is resorting to some rather
desperate strategies these days, like supposing that the person in
the Chinese Room might be mistake about whether or not they understand
Chinese, or else trying to put off any consideration of Searle's
argument by endless disputes over the word "understand".

> 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'.

But these are two different things!  (Being correlated with a picture
vs knowing a certain 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?

I don't see why adding links between meaningless symbols would make
much difference.  Can you say why it should?

> 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.

But this is a different case again.  You can't just assume that all
the information humans have is just a matter of correlations between
meaningless squiggles.  Indeed, maybe it's not possible to put all the
information into a database.

-- jd


