From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo Tue Mar 24 09:57:24 EST 1992
Article 4605 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: What comes after the Systems Reply? SEMANTICS!
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Mar18.035719.3394@psych.toronto.edu> <6428@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <1992Mar19.151622.26726@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1992 15:16:22 GMT

In article <6428@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>For my part, I will no longer attempt to answer arguments that fall
>in the areas where I think further dispute is more or less pointless.
>
Good idea! Let's move on. 

To a first approximation, if, as at least some of us believe, the CR
does not have semantics, and we do, then what we need to do is figure   
out how to get semantics into the (some) machine.
 
Now let's refine that a little. There are many who now believe that
semantics, per se, is not what humans have in their heads. The most
famous advocate of this position is Putnam. The argument, impossibly
briefly, goes like this: meanings are instensions, and intensions
determine extensions, but since we clearly do not have extensions
of all the things we know about (e.g., we are sometime confused about
gold and iron pyrite), we must not have intensions -- i.e., meanings --
in our heads. So what do we have? The current in vogue phrase is
"cognitive content".  Cognitive content poses many of the same problem
that semantics did, however. How is it that it "refers" to outside
objects? What about the (albeit perhaps partial") intensions we do
have access to?

This, to my mind (and not only my mind), is the crucial question facing
computational cognitive science today.
 
Comments?

-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
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