flefever wrote:
>> Well...not to put too fine a point on it, but... Do you really mean to
> say that ability to "identify the object in the world" is the critical
> requirement?
That does seem to be what these "symbol grounding" folks seem to mean.
But I think it clear from "brain in the vat" considerations that
this is the wrong track. "snow is blue" might "really mean"
(I'm using their language) "7 is greater than 91", but this would have
no consequence in re whether we understand the sentence "snow is blue".
Looking at a computer and seeing that it's "snow is blue" corresponds
to our "7 is greater than 91" and therefore denying that it
"understands" is a confusion of viewpoints and levels of description.
People only get away with it because we don't yet have a formal
model of human cognition where we can point to the obvious counterpart.
> Would it suffice to add some input resulting from an
> object's knocking at the room's front door? Would this allow a
> "semantic association"? (e.g., "hey, Chinese room: you know that thing
> we call a 'solid object', that is related to this, that, and the other
> thing we talked about? well, that's whatt just bumped up against your
> door."))
Indeed, it's all a matter of *relationships*. "symbol grounding"
is just another form of absolutism.
> >Just look at Jim Balter, who even plonked me now
> >because I told him (via PM) that I don't consider insults as
> >convincing arguments.
I plonked you because, among other things, you label criticisms
as "insults" and thereby protect your ego but avoid self-correction,
and stay forever stuck in your reasonable-seeming misconceptions.
And I certainly would have plonked you in any case had I known that
you would refer publicly to "PM", a most despicable practice,
especially when you use it to characterize *my* motivation in terms
of *your* interpretation, an interpretation that you can be sure
*I*, who acted, don't share. This is again a confusion of viewpoints.
I would never plonk someone for not considering insults to be convincing
arguments; if you seriously believe that to be the case, you are
being intellectually dishonest, and if you don't, you are being
ordinarily dishonest (oh, I guess to you that would be an "insult").
Even if you are correct in your belief that I was insulting you and you
were simply refusing to accept such insults as arguments, you cannot
correctly represent that as why I plonked you if I don't happen to share
your belief. That's an application of Leibniz' Law in an intensional
context, which is quite invalid. (The paradigmatic example: Oedipus
married Jocasta because she was the queen of Thebes, but Oedipus did not
marry Jocasta because she was his mother, even though his mother was the
queen of Thebes.)
Avoiding fallacious reasoning is difficult and rare. If you take
every claim that you are engaging in fallacy as "an insult",
you can count on never leaving the fold.
--
<J Q B>
