[Wittrs] Re: My Chinese Encyclopedia
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:56:46 -0000
No, you don't "digress" Gordon, you repeat. Repeatedly.
Your encyclopedia example is just more of the same mistake you keep making.
It's just another version of the CR with the same fundamental error: confusing
a non-identity claim (which no one disputes) with a non-causal one (which isn't
established).
Read the links I've posted nearby re: the logical fallacy of equivocation.
Maybe then you'll start to get a glimmer of this. (Or, as is unfortunately more
likely, decide to stamp your foot even harder!)
SWM
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Gordon Swobe <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> 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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