From: pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
Organization: UTCS Public Access
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 21:12:51 GMT

In article <C0EqIH.Ep4@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <C0E8KI.Enu@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>>In article <C0CHsG.557@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>>>Nonsense.  The job of the top chess programs is to play chess, and they do
>>>it very well; are they grounded?  
>>
>>Are you saying that these programs (or rather processe present when the
>>programs are running) are less grounded w.r.t. chess than human players?
>>Why so?
>
>For the same reasons that toasters are not grounded w.r.t. making toast.
>Groundedness has to do with whether your use of language has semantic
>content; you have to have language use before you're even a candidate.
>
I have to disagree. Imagine a dumb and deaf person who learnt to play chess by
watching. Is she/he less grounded w.r.t the game of chess than a language
capable person? We are not talking here about grounding of language terms.
To decide a question of the toaster we need a definition of grounding. I know 
that some people are scared by the idea of having to define the terms they
are using. I hope you are not one of them. You might say that any definition
of grounding which would give even a slightest degree of grounding to a toaster 
(w.r.t. making toast) is faulty, but I would disagree. Such an attitude makes
grounding by definition a property of humans only and the whole discussion
is then moot.

>>>Obviously the job has to have something to
>>>do with tasks for which humans need to be grounded-- and even there effective
>>>performance is no proof; a computer might be able to execute those tasks
>>>in a different way, without needing to be grounded at all.
>>>
>>How would one define grounding to make the above statement true?
>
>Consider a medical expert system written in Prolog.  It might well be able
>to answer medical questions correctly without knowing anything about medicine
>in any useful sense.  All it "knows" is statements like P(x) --> Q(x), 
>and rules for manipulating them; the semantics is supplied entirely by
>the user.
>
1. What do you mean by 'any useful sense'? If the expert system was able to 
write a prescription for you, which you would then use, would it not be 
'useful'?
2. When we are discussing over the network, I type in a string of letters and
get in a response another string of letters - P(x) --> Q(x), and it is me
(the user) who supplies semantics. Things would be no different in principle
if we were to discuss face to face. Those acoustic vibrations which you would
produce would have no intrinsic semantics, I would have to supply the semantics
entirely by myself. Do you agree? If you do not, please indicate where else
would their meaning come from. 

>>Of course there are people who are good at 'mouthing' and nothing else, but
>>if you are talking about abstract concepts a Turing type test is an only way
>>of testing grounding (may be you know another one, I'll be very glad to learn).
>
>The Turing Test seems to function chiefly as a means of avoiding the task
>of analyzing cognitive functions.  If humans can identify groundedness, or
>any other cognitive capacity, from a Turing transcript, they should be able
>to work out the criteria for their judgments and devise a more direct test.

You are not serious about it, are you? A Turing transcript is a string of
meaningles symbols, to which a reader supplies meaning, but this is no
different from any empirical endevour where the observer supplies meaning to
whatever she/he observes, entirely by her/himself. 
I suspect that the fact that a TT
is an only available test for grounding (and other things like 'understanding'
or 'intelligence', etc) may have a deep philosophical meaning telling us
something about these concepts (i.e. about their subjective nature).

Andrzej

-- 
Andrzej Pindor
University of Toronto
Computing Services
pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy