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Article 2014 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sfleming@cs.hw.ac.uk (Stewart Fleming)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Zeleny (was Re: Searle
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Date: 10 Dec 91 17:24:49 GMT
References: <1991Dec2.110629.6077@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec3.181458.18420@cherokee.uswest.com> <1991Dec8.180409.6324@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec9.161328.16412@cherokee.uswest.com>
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ken@dakota (Kenny Chaffin) writes:
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>Symbolic representation presupposes semantics.

>	Does it?
>	Surely animal's have symbols in their minds of things, does this also
>include having semantics? Bee's for instance communicate with one another 
>through a dance. Do bees attach meaning to the various "words" and symbols in
>their dance?

[First of all, let me appease the RAB crowd with a book reference...]
K. von Frisch, 1966.  The Dancing Bees.  Methuen, London.

Extract from P.N.Johnson-Laird, 1983.  Mental Models : Toward a
Cognitive Science
of Language, Inference and Consciousness. CUP p405:

"There is no doubt that the bee constructs a model of the spatial location
of the food source and is able to transmit the salient features of this model
to her fellow workers...The bee uses a symbolic response A'' that corresponds
to an element in an internal representation A' that corresponds to a state of
affairs A in the world...Yet bees do not possess a language in which symbols
refer to the world in the way in which human beings can make reference to it."

Model-theoretic semantics leads to the hypothesis that meaning is a composition
of the meanings of components of a sentence (for example).  The significance of
a sentence transcends the meaning because it can only be established by
relating the propositional representation (a statement with a truth value) to
a mental model and to general knowledge.  To understand what the bee
communicates, effectively you must become a bee.

[I seem to remember from far off an Oriental legend called _The Dream of
the Ants_]

We have, conceivably, ways of "becoming bees".  The "mental structure"
of a bee is
perhaps one million neurons.  If we constructed a working model of a
bee, complete
with telemetry capability, and caused it to enter a hive and carry out
the dance,
would we then be "communicating" with the other bees ?  How would this
hypothesis
be tested ?  What if we "communicate" the wrong information ?  Can bees
lie ?

If there is only one symbol, is there a need for semantics ?  Or does the need
for semantics arise from the need to differentiate between more than one
symbol ?

STF
--

>KAC

--
sfleming@cs.hw.ac.uk                        ...ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!sfleming


