Organization: Penn State University
Date: Wednesday, 8 Apr 1992 19:47:44 EDT
From: <JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: syntax and semantics
 <1992Apr4.061244.767@mp.cs.niu.edu> <92098.170625JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu>
 <1992Apr8.215800.18021@mp.cs.niu.edu>

In article <1992Apr8.215800.18021@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil
Rickert) says:
>
>In article <92098.170625JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu> JPE1@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
>>In article <1992Apr4.061244.767@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil
>>Rickert) says:
>>> Would that Searle were that precise in his use of "syntactic".  But he
>>>also says that every thing a computer can do is syntactic, and this
>>>therefore includes computing averages and correlations of very imprecise
>>>floating point information.
>>>
>>    Are you suggesting that such computations are _not_ syntactic?  In what
>>manner would they not be?  From what I understand, whatever the computer does
>>_is_ "formal" and "precise", although we may interpret its output as
>>_meaning_ something imprecise.
>
> It is of course possible to view floating point arithmetic as formal and
>precise.  If you view it that way the floating point numbers satisfy some
>very strange and quite complex algebraic properties.  Moreover the
>algebra of floating point numbers as implemented on one machine is quite
>different from the algebra as implemented on a different machine.  All in
>all, when viewed this way floating point numbers are useless curiosities.
>However if view as approximations to real numbers then we have a much
>simpler algebra (the algebra of real numbers), we have consistency between
>different machines, but the numbers are no longer precise, since they are
>approximations.
>
> By all means consider everything done by a computer as formal manipulations
>with no semantic content.  That is your loss, not mine.  And by the way,
>I suggest that you ask your bank to transfer all of your accounts to me.  They
>are clearly useless to you, since they are mere formal manipulations of a
>computer without semantic content.  But once transferred to me I suspect I
>can squeeze enough semantics out of them to buy myself a few good meals.
>--
     The point is not that what computers do is _necessarily_ meaningless, just
that, at the machine level, there is no inherent meaning (or reference).  It
is we who come along and project reference upon the formal manipulations that
the computer has carried out.   I can't say that I know or understand enough
(about either math or computers) to follow your floating point arithmetic
example, but in the case of my bank account, the point would be something
like this: the bank's computer need not "know" anything about money or
buying meals in order to carry out the mechanical functions that it performs
as a matter of is causal operation.  However, this activity of the computer
takes place in a pragmatic context of human behavior in which we use the
behavior of the computer to track my finances.  If you and I enter into an
agreement that my account is now yours, the computer's identical physical
state now "means" (in the pragmatic context) that you can buy food and I
can't.  But it's all the same to the computer.  (Although some state of the
computer (say, the account number) will also eventually be changed so that
the agreement that we made will now be reflected in (understood by the
actors in) the whole pragmatic context of bank tellers, restaurant personnel,
etc.)  Now this does not, of course, show that our brains "have meaning"
in some _other_ way than the computer's state does (i.e. by the role each
plays in the pragmatic context), but I hope it does serve to clarify what one
might be trying to say by differentiating the syntactical operations of
computers from their semantic interpretation.



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