[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA

[Gordon Swobe]

Hi Stathis,

>> I brought this factoid to post here on ExI because I
> noticed that a person afflicted with Wernicke's aphasia has
> much in common with the man in Searle's Chinese Room. Like
> the man in Searle's room, he follows the rules of syntax but
> knows not whereof he speaks.
>
> But the man in the Chinese Room does not produce gibberish.

Yes, I understand that. I have for several weeks engaged in a debate about Searle's Chinese Room Argument on another discussion list, one devoted to discussion of philosophy. My interlocutor there teaches philosophy and has great admiration for Professor Searle.

I've taken the position that for the thought experiment portion of Searle's CRA to have any value -- that if we should consider it anything more than mere philosophical hand-waving -- then it must first qualify as a valid scientific experiment. To qualify as such, it must work in a context-independent manner; scientists anywhere in the universe should obtain the same results using the same man in the room. And for that to happen, I argue, the man in the room must lack knowledge not only of the meanings of Chinese symbols, but also the words and symbols of every possible language in the universe. He must have no semantics whatsoever.

Somewhat tongue in cheek, I continued my argument by stating the subject would need to undergo brain surgery prior to the experiment to remove the relevant parts of his brain. I then did a little research and learned we would need to remove Wernicke's area, and learned also of this interesting phenomenon of Wernicke's aphasia.

One might consider the existence of Wernicke's aphasia as evidence supporting Searle's third premise in his CRA, that 'syntax is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics'. People with this strange malady have an obvious grasp of syntax but also clearly have no idea what they're talking about!

> In other words,the components don't know what they're doing, but the
> system does.

So goes the systems reply to the CRA, one of many that Searle fielded with varying degrees of success depending on who you ask.

-gts