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Article 4462 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Systems Reply I
Message-ID: <1992Mar15.011107.7828@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 92 01:11:07 GMT
References: <BL1p0D.6II@world.std.com> <1992Mar14.182737.15329@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar14.213045.21776@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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In article <1992Mar14.213045.21776@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In article <1992Mar14.182737.15329@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>>
>>The first premise is simply that syntactic manipulation cannot on its own
>>yield semantics, which has been argued to be an analytic truth by many
>>philosophers who are not involved in the AI debate.
>>
 ...

>  There has been much discussion of the problem that "understanding" is
>not well defined.  But an even more serious problem is that neither
>"syntax" nor "semantics" are well defined.
>
>  The claim "syntax can't yield semantics" is intuitively appealing, but
>this does not make it true, and indeed it is a statement without content
>until we have precise definitions of "syntax" and of "semantics".  In the

I have the same sense.  I have assumed that "semantics" refers to the
correspondence between expressions and (say) things.  Or something
like that; please correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, if that is what semantics means, then there's something wrong
with the idea -- as I suggested in that old paper mentioned recently
by Smoliar: "Matter, Mind and Models," 1965, represnted in Semantic
Information Processing.  Because, of course, you could assign the
expression "cow" to anything _you_ want.  Yes, to be sure, it wouldn't
be useful to do so unless there were some _nice_ morphisms between the
expressions and the things.  But the point is that there has to be a
third party, namely, the _you_ who is doing the assignment in a manner
that you consider _nice_.  So when we say "John is talking about
Boston" this is an abbreviation for something like "I consider John to
be talking about (what I mean by) Boston," etc.

In other words, semantics is relative to a third party, an
interpreter, etc., -- and hence the situation is actually somewhat
worse than as Neil W. Rickert has described.  What I mean is that I
agree with him about the subject being muddy until we have a precise
definition of "semantics" -- but if we have to agree (as I maintain)
that the required definition involves a somewhat arbitrary third
party, then the subject will remain muddy after that, as well.

I don't consider that bad, by the way.  Just as I argued that the
concept of "understand" (as used in "X does not understand Chinese")
involves a notion from naive common sense that will not survive the
recognition of the psychology of multiple representations, the naive
commonsense notion of "semantics" perhaps should not be pushed beyond
the corresponding envelope of over-simple models of meaning and
communication.

 "Philosophy is (mostly) bad Psychology".      .. me.


