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Article 1310 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Animal Intelligence vs Human Intelligence
Message-ID: <1991Nov14.133442.6577@nntp.hut.fi>
Date: 14 Nov 91 13:34:42 GMT
References: <37311@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Oct24.234823.7560@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> <37443@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Oct31.235402.12739@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> <37658@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Nov02.075827.27740kmc@netcom.COM> <37713@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Nov05.08
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In-Reply-To: map@u02.svl.cdc.com (Mark Peters)
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In article <37736@shamash.cdc.com>, map@u02 (Mark Peters) writes:
>I don't see any justification for this view.  Even though you deny
>that Washoe has the concept "lying," and deny below that this concept
>presupposes a bunch of ethical and epistemological concepts, what you
>wrote above implies the opposite.  How could Washoe (or a human, for
>that matter) imagine "a situation she knew not to be true" and then
>relate it "for the purpose of having it taken for the truth" without
>having a grasp in some terms of the concepts "knowledge," "truth," and
>"honesty" (among others)?  I say that this is impossible.

I think a somewhat equivalent question is:

How can a child learn to talk, with no grasp of concepts like "word",
"phoneme", "morpheme", "concept", "semantics", "pronounciation", etc.
Shouldn't that also be impossible along the same lines?

>What I said is exactly correct.  Nobody can tell a lie (and know he is)
>unless he already has some grasp of what honesty is, simply because
>lying *is* one form of NOT being honest.

Ah.  If that's how you define "lying", then of course you are right.
Hmm.  But you added the requirement that he _knows_ that he is telling
a lie - that wasn't in the picture earlier and it changes things a lot.

>Initially, the child undoubtedly grasps these concepts in a primitive 
>way (much as I described them), but the point is, he must have that 
>grasp before he can grasp "lying."

I don't agree.  See below.

>I think "apparent lying behavior" is just that - apparent behavior that
>does not require conceptualization to perform.

Yes.  In my vocabulary I think it can be called lying, the way you
defined lying above it can't.

>Washoe doesn't have *any*
>grasp (even a primitive one) of the concepts mentioned above,

Hmm - I find this without content, since there have been presented no
observations about this here.

>so she 
>can't know what "lying" is.

I argue that she still can lie, without knowing it.

And I don't think it's such a big leap for her to recognize the
behaviour as a concept called 'lying'.  And no, I don't think
recognizing the concept of lying requires knowing all the concepts you
enumerated earlier.  I didn't have to know about the concepts behind
phonology to learn to recognice what letters are vowels and what are
consonants.  Also, I didn't need to learn the concepts behind English
or Swedish to recognize English or Swedish when I saw the languages or
listened to them.

>What looks to us like "lying behavior" is
>explainable in perceptual terms, so I think that positing a conceptual
>faculty in apes on the basis of that behavior is not justified.

I agree.  But I also think that saying that they don't have or can't
have a conceptual faculty based on that is not justified.

//Jyrki


