I'm afraid I didn't quite get your point.
flefever wrote:
>> Do you really mean to
> say that ability to "identify the object in the world" is the critical
> requirement?
Not at all. I never spoke of this ability.
I said: "If all you knew about an object was it's name and place in a
system of element relations [...], it would be impossible to identify
the object in the world."
It would be impossible not due to a lack of capacity, but because the
information is far to little to fix the object. The object may be snow
or the number 47 or whatever, it would be logically impossible to find
this out given only the information you have.
> Would it suffice to add some input resulting from an
> object's knocking at the room's front door?
sure - provided that
a) the room would from then on "associate" the experience of the
knocking with one or more of the terms in its belief system, thereby
giving the relevant variables a property which cannot be ramseyfied (a
property like: "feels like _that_")
b) this would suffice to fix all or at least most of the references of
the terms in the room's belief system.
BTW I'm not quite sure about the degree of "reduction of matching
possible worlds" that is necessry for a cognitive system to yield
meaning and understanding. There may well be infinitely many possible
worlds matching all our beliefs _and_ sensory associations [1]. But to
understand the meaning of a word or sentence it should be enough to
reduce the objects this term could refer to to a suitably low number
of somehow related objects. The details of this issue depend of course
on what concept of meaning you prefer.
Wolfgang.
[1] cf. Laurence BonJour: "The Structure of Empirical Knowledge",
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985, pp.144 & 243 n.4
--
homepage: http://www.wald.org/wolfgang
"Wo kaemen wir hin, wenn jeder sagte: 'wo kaemen wir hin?' und keiner
ginge, um zu sehen, wohin wir kaemen, wenn wir gingen?"
