[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Mon, 12/7/09, John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Searle replies that the man could in principle
> memorize the syntactic rule-book, thus internalizing the
> formal program and the entire room/system. On
> Searle's view such a man would still lack understanding
> of the Chinese symbols.
> 
> Then either the little man in the room is lying
> about his linguistic inadequacy or...

What little man in the room, John? We have now only this real flesh and blood man who goes by the name Cram. His brain runs a formal program that uses syntactic rules to answer Chinese questions with Chinese answers. 

Some Chinese guy comes along and says "sguiggle" so Cram dutifully looks it up in his mental look up table and replies "squaggle". The Chinese guy responds in Chinese "Thanks for the sage advice, Cram!" 

But Cram has no idea what "sguiggle" or "squaggle" means. From his point of view, he's no different from the Wernicke aphasiac who speaks nonsense with proper syntax.

-gts