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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle's Pearls
Message-ID: <2029@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Nov-85 00:53:01 EST
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Posted: Mon Nov  4 00:53:01 1985
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> Indeed, following Wittgenstein, one can argue that the man in question
> most evidently *did* understand at least the sentence "we have to leave
> the building", even though he might not be able to identify the individual
> words within the sentence.  Of course, a real human could eventually learn
> to isolate and recombine the individual words once he had seen them in
> a variety of contexts and associated with appropriately related
> "sensory observations and movements".
> 
> Having studied Wittgenstein under Searle years ago, I think that Searle
> would maintain that it is precisely the isolation of language behavior
> from other behavior in the Chinese room that implies a lack of
> understanding.
> 						Baba

Could one ever "learn" language in a vacuum, without context based on
experiencing and sensing the things that words represent?
-- 
"Mrs. Peel, we're needed..."			Rich Rosen 	ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr