From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.bbn.com!olivea!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff Tue Mar 24 09:56:26 EST 1992
Article 4517 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.bbn.com!olivea!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff
>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese room miscellanea
Message-ID: <6417@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Mar 92 22:54:26 GMT
References: <44825@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1992Mar13.204017.25480@cs.yale.edu> <1992Mar17.022115.11185@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 27

In article <1992Mar17.022115.11185@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>This sounds like it could be fun, though I have serious doubts about
>whether it will get any further than the usual "The system
>understands" versus "That's ridiculous!", though.  The anti-CR people
>will no doubt be frustrated by the inability of the pro-CR'ers to give
>a concrete argument against the systems reply (indeed I think that
>both Dalton and Gemar have conceded that it's an open question,

I've conceded nothing of the sort.  I said it was an open question
right at the start.  What I object to is when anti-CR folk go beyond
"maybe the system understands" to "the system understands".  And I
also think the anti-CR side has relied on some fairly bad arguments
(eg, the Turing Test as virtually a definition of understanding) while
failing to take seriously the difficulty of what we might call symbol
grounding or "how do meaningless symbols ever acquire meaning?"

For instance, the only answer to Putnam's "cats and cherries"
I've seen from the anti-CR side is the statament that Putnam's
theorem is a triviality of model theory.

Anyway, I'm not surprised that people are getting tired of
the endless non-progressing debate.  It's been going on for
years hasn't it?  At least it seemed to be there whenever I
looked at the relevant newsgroup.

-- jd


