On Monday 15 October 2007 10:21:48 am, Edward W. Porter wrote: > Josh, > > Also a good post.
Thank you! > You seem to be defining "grounding" as having meaning, in a semantic > sense. Certainly it has meaning, as generally used in the philosophical literature. I'm arguing that its meaning makes an assumption about the nature of semantics that obscures rather than informing some important questions. > If so, why is it a meaningless question to ask if "2" in your > calculator has grounding, since you say the calculator has limited but > real semantics. Would not the relationships "2" has to other numbers in > the semantics of that system be a limited form of semantics. Not meaningless -- I'd just say that for the 2 in my calculator, the answer is no, in Harnad's fairly precise sense of grounding. Whereas the calculator clearly does have the appropriate semantics for arithmetic. > And what other source besides experience can grounding come from, either > directly or indirectly? The semantic model of arithmetic in you > calculator was presumably derived from years of human experience that > found the generalities of arithmetic to be valid and useful in the real > world of things like sheep, cows, and money. I'd claim that this is a fairly elastic use of the term "experience". Typically one assumes that experience means the experience of the person, AI, or whatever that we're talking about, in this case the calculator. The 2 in the calculator clearly does not get its semantics from the calculator's experience. If we allow an expanded meaning of experience as including the experience of the designer of the system, we more or less have to allow it to mean any feedback in the evolutionary process that produced the low-level semantic mechanisms in our own brains. This strains my concept of the word a bit. Whether we allow that or not, I claim that we can talk about a more proximate criterion for semantics, which is that the system forms a model of some phenomenon of interest. It may well be that experience, narrowly or broadly construed, is often the best way of producing such a system (and in fact I believe that it is), but the questions are logically separable. It's conceivable to have a system that has the appropriate semantics that was just randomly produced, for example, whereas the reverse, a system basedon experience that DOESN'T model the phenomenon, wouldn't have the semantics in my view. The most common case of a randomly-created semantic model that didn't arise from experience is the creation of social realities by fiat, as in the classic case of money. We (somebody) made up what money is and how it should work, and the reality that system models followed because we built the reality to match the system, rather than the other way around. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=53722312-b0a1a5
