[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA.

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/12/8 Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>:

> Premise A1: Programs are formal (syntactic).
> Premise A2: Minds have mental contents (semantics).
> Premise A3: Syntax is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics.
>
> Ergo,
>
> Conclusion C1: Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
>
> So then Searle gives us at least four targets at which to aim (three premises and the opportunity to deny that his conclusion follows).
>
> He continues with more formal arguments to defend his philosophy of mind, what he calls biological naturalism, but if C1 doesn't hold then we needn't consider them.
>
> I came back to ExI after a long hiatus (I have 6000+ unread messages in my ExI mail folder) because I was struck by the fact that Wernicke's aphasia lends support to A3, normally considered the only controversial premise in his argument.

The A1/A2 dichotomy is deceptive. A human child learns that if it
utters a particular word it gets a particular response, and a computer
program can learn the same thing. Why would you say the child
"understands" the word but the program doesn't?


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou