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Article 1901 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: The Robot Reply (was Re: Searle, again)
Message-ID: <YAMAUCHI.91Dec5235651@heron.cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 91 04:56:51 GMT
References: <2127@ucl-cs.uucp> <91338.113617KELLYDK@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <5796@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Organization: University of Rochester
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In-Reply-To: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk's message of 5 Dec 91 17:50:20 GMT
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In article <5796@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>Searle considers robots, at least, because of the so-called
>"robot reply": if you give the Room some sensors, the ability
>to manipulate objects, etc, it will understand.  Searle points
>out that the outputs of the sensors, the control instructions
>for the manipulators, etc, are just more symbols that have to
>-- somehow -- be given meanings.  So it's symbol manipulation
>again.

Yes, but it's not *just* symbol manipulation.  The point is that such
a robot would be interacting with the real-world (or a close
facsimile) and *that*is what attaches "semantic" (i.e. perceptual)
meanings to "syntactic" symbols.


