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Article 4989 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: syntax and semantics
Message-ID: <1992Apr8.215800.18021@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 8 Apr 92 21:58:00 GMT
References: <1992Apr03.164328.8107@spss.com> <1992Apr4.061244.767@mp.cs.niu.edu> <92098.170625JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 36

In article <92098.170625JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu> JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
>In article <1992Apr4.061244.767@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil
>Rickert) says:
>> Would that Searle were that precise in his use of "syntactic".  But he
>>also says that every thing a computer can do is syntactic, and this
>>therefore includes computing averages and correlations of very imprecise
>>floating point information.
>>
>    Are you suggesting that such computations are _not_ syntactic?  In what
>manner would they not be?  From what I understand, whatever the computer does
>_is_ "formal" and "precise", although we may interpret its output as
>_meaning_ something imprecise.

 It is of course possible to view floating point arithmetic as formal and
precise.  If you view it that way the floating point numbers satisfy some
very strange and quite complex algebraic properties.  Moreover the
algebra of floating point numbers as implemented on one machine is quite
different from the algebra as implemented on a different machine.  All in
all, when viewed this way floating point numbers are useless curiosities.
However if view as approximations to real numbers then we have a much
simpler algebra (the algebra of real numbers), we have consistency between
different machines, but the numbers are no longer precise, since they are
approximations.

 By all means consider everything done by a computer as formal manipulations
with no semantic content.  That is your loss, not mine.  And by the way,
I suggest that you ask your bank to transfer all of your accounts to me.  They
are clearly useless to you, since they are mere formal manipulations of a
computer without semantic content.  But once transferred to me I suspect I
can squeeze enough semantics out of them to buy myself a few good meals.

-- 
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=
  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


