What's the difference between gesticulating and "playing chess?" I
guess you need the name "chess" to play chess. Does that answer the
question?
Walter Okshevsky wrote:
I would have thought that the question to follow from Robert's thought experiment is whether the two can still be said to be playing chess. It seems clear they are playing a game. While hitchhiking through France, my friend and I would play mental chess to pass the time between cars on lonely stretches of road. I suppose that instead of saying "PXB" we could use a gesture and grunt of some sort, after devising a language for this - a language that would house the relevant concepts and names. We would be playing chess since the signs in our language corresponded to, accorded with the rules of chess.
Walter Okshevsky Remembering Monique
On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Robert Paul wrote:
John Wager wrote:
Doesn't the fact that computers play chess mean its possible to "learn"
chess without any concepts or any names? (I know programs are written
using shorthand compilers, but one might write the whole thing in MASM
(assembly language) which doesn't use short-hand names for anything
resembling a chess move. )
<>?But now imagine a game of chess translated by certain rules into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a _game_?say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people [mentioned earlier] to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by certain rules into a game of chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so?
Philosophical Investigations §200.
Robert Paul Reed College perplexed as ever
