[Wittrs] My Chinese Encyclopedia
- From: Gordon Swobe <gts_2000@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:47:21 -0700 (PDT)
Let us say I have an enormous Chinese encyclopedia containing thousands of
volumes. Each volume contains thousands of Chinese symbols. My Chinese
encyclopedia contains every fact of Chinese knowledge and every possible
Chinese expression.
I hire a genius English speaking linguist and a genius English speaking
cryptographer. Neither of them understand a word of Chinese, but they have lots
of time on their hands and they're very clever fellows. Their job: to catalog
all the Chinese symbols and decipher Chinese syntax.
At the end they have a huge volume of symbols and another huge volume
containing all the syntactic rules. They can show me the shapes of each and
every Chinese symbol. Also they can show me that a "squoogle" must always
follow after a "squiggle", that "sqeekles" must appear three symbols before
every "squapple" and so on and so on. They have identified and even memorized
every syntactical rule/pattern and every shape of every symbol. They know
everything that anyone can ever possibly know about the FORM of my Chinese
encyclopedia; that is, they know everything about its SYNTAX.
But alas despite their heroic efforts they still know nothing about the
meanings of the symbols. They still don't know a word of Chinese.
And why don't they know a word of Chinese even after all that hard work? Why
don't they understand the Chinese encyclopedia even after having acquired
complete knowledge of its syntactic form?
Here's why: Searle's axiom 3 = true; syntax by itself is neither constitutive
of nor sufficient for semantics.
To crack the semantics, the English cryptographer will need to get some
Chinese-to-English semantic knowledge from some source... from some Rosetta
Stone. But I digress...
-gts
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