From: zeleny@widder.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Reference (was: A rock implements every FSA)
Date: 11 Apr 92 22:08:11 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Apr11.180817.10970
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.

In article <6752@pkmab.se> ske@pkmab.se 
(Kristoffer Eriksson) writes:

>In article <1992Apr6.114955.10762@husc3.harvard.edu>
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes: 

MZ:
>>N.B.  I haven't answered your article about semantics simply because there
>>seems to be nothing to say,

KE:
>Ah, at last I have confirmation that you have seen that article at all.
>It is kind-of hard for the sender to see the difference between non-receipt
>and received-but-discarded with our current e-mail and news systems.
>
>Also, by not answering at all, I can't know whether you don't answer
>because you agree or because you disagree or because you're not interested,
>and it deprives me of any opportunity to straighten out misunderstandings
>(or to learn more, if things would turn out that lucky).

Mea culpa.  Your messages tend to get longer and longer, so once they cross
the 200 line boundary, without (in my estimation) adding anything new to
what you already said before, I tend to disregard them.

MZ:
>> beyond reiterating that your quasi-Russellian
>>view admits the possibility of referring to phenomenal data only.

KE:
>If it does admit any kind of reference at all, I think I may have disproved
>the assertion of your's that I originally reacted to.

Not so.  Even if I admitted the possibility of an automaton referring to
its own internal representations, your observation would also have to
satisfy the sufficient conditions for such reference.  Since agency is not
available to your functionalist brethren, they would have to come up with
something else that links the internal sign-token with its putative
referent.  Now, any evidence of causal connection between the latter and
the former as they might adduce in support of their "intention-free
reference" theses would have to dissolve Hume's problem about causality by
exhibiting conclusive evidence for the existence of a necessary connections
between putative causes and their observable effects.  In other words, they
will have a problem even with estabilishing internal causal relations
irrespectively of an external observer's ``causal stance'', which would
allow them to arbitrarily interpret observed regularities as evidence of
causal connections.  Even then, the referential capabilities of your
artificial mind will be limited to such causal relations as are entirely
immanent in its surrogate nervous activity.  External causes just don't
make the grade: remember that your goal is to construct a machine capable
of reference; it wouldn't do to have the universe refer on its behalf.

KE:
>However, if you mean that the previous iteration of this was your statement
>that "logically proper names can only denote such entitities as we are
>directly acquainted with, i.e. sense-data, universals, and our selves." then
>it is not much of an answer since my previous article already attempted to
>address that objection. You can't refute an answer by reiterating your
>original statement, as if nothing happened. There are more constructive
>ways to do that, for instance pointing out what you disagree with in the
>answer.

Funny, I had thought that your disagreement with me proceeded by the same
reiteration of your original objection to my argument that you are now
imputing to me.

KE:
>My argument was basically that it would be possible to refer to the things
>that cause, or could cause, your phenomenal experience by using a description
>of those things based on the phenomenal data that they case, or could cause.
								 ^^^^^
>(That's a "causal connection"!) Furthermore, I claim support for this view
>in your own explanation of the insufficiency of purely denotative and purely
>connotative signs, since you have there already admitted most of these
>mechanisms as possible, except that you just didn't connect them to each
>other in order to solve the problem as a whole. Thus my position is that
>you can not deny my conclusion without either dropping some of your own
>original argumentation, or show a logical flaw in my reasoning. (That's
>what makes it interesting.)

Pay attention to that "could"; that's exactly where you get into obvious
trouble with Hume.  As for the rest of your assertion, its premisses are
already rejected in my original statement of Dennett's dilemma.  I quote:

___________________________________________________________________________

If, on one hand, one identifies the neural pulses as purely denotative
signs, ones that refer without expressing, one would be forced to postulate
a causal relation in virtue of which these signs denote, stipulating that
this causal relation is itself entirely immanent in nervous activity, in
direct contradiction to the fact that our language, allegedly founded
solely on such nervous activity,\footnote{To the extent that causal
connections and correlations can't fix reference, it doesnt exist, insofar
as reference that doesn't get fixed is no reference at all.  The
implications of that are as follows: functionalism about semantics implies
eliminativist semantics, including the notion of truth itself.  Hence, no
functionalist theory can claim to be true.  This is well understood by
Churchland, who is currently looking for a ``successor notion'' to truth;
unfortunately he fails to realize that his notion of ``sensory vectors'' is
itself dependent on a ``stolen concept'' of reference.  See [Churchland
1988]: 146.} has no trouble referring to objects and phenomena that occur
outside of the latter.  For, if a purely material entity can be said to
refer, the mechanism of such reference must be taken as being wholly within
the provenance of the entity in question, to the extent that we are
justified in ascribing the reference to the said entity, rather than to the
extrinsic factors of its relation to its environment; furthermore, once we
reject solipsism, we are forced to infer an external reality of potential
denotata, unconnected to our putative subject in any manner that can be
wholly subsumed by it.

On the other hand, should one assume that the signs in question are
connotative, referring by virtue of expressing an intensional meaning, then
such meaning, by the above observation, must be entirely captured in the
physical states of the brain; it matters not at all whether meanings are
taken to be states, things, or processes, -- if your theory quantifies over
meanings, as any theory of representation must do, they belong to its
ontology, i.e.~are bona fide objects.  Now, as I have argued in the
pervious section, intensions, once admitted, bring in a transfinite
hierarchy thereof; in other words, on the connotative theory, reference
depends on the grasp of (and, under the reductive materialist assumption,
physical embodiment of) meanings, which depend on meanings of meanings,
which in turn depend on meanings of meanings of meanings, and so on.  For
at each intensional level it is reasonable to interpret the concept as yet
another sign, asking what is the factor in virtue of which it succeeds in
referring to an object;\footnote{See [Church 1951].} in other words, it
does us no good to argue that in practice a brain, a mind, or a computer
only uses a finite initial segment of the intensional hierarchy, for the
question of the nature of reference will only reappear on the highest
admitted level thereof. The reason for the infinite regression consists in
the fact that the representational function of the sign is taken to be
dependent on its expressive capacity, or on some sort of direct connection
to the object it denotes.  Notably, the cogitator's awareness (or, if you
wish, computation) of each member of the infinite hierarchy of meanings is
never an issue; on the other hand, the meaning's residence (in some
intelligible sense of the term) in his mind (or whatever physical structure
is supposed to pass for such) surely is.\footnote{I am certainly not
suggesting that the representational mind {\it eo ipso} performs an
infinite computation somehow connecting its internal representations to the
objects represented by them; all the above argument is designed to
estabilish is that representational capacity cannot be explained under
materialist premisses.}

______________________________________________________________________________

You will observe that your objection has been ruled out by the
considerations in the first paragraph.  If you want to address them, be my
guest; but please be aware that I shall answer only genuine attempts to do
so, ignoring any automatic gainsaying of its points.


`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'
: Qu'est-ce qui est bien?  Qu'est-ce qui est laid?         Harvard   :
: Qu'est-ce qui est grand, fort, faible...                 doesn't   :
: Connais pas! Connais pas!                                 think    :
:                                                             so     :
: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
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'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
From: reinhard@hpscit.sc.hp.com (Reinhard Seidel)
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 02:05:15 GMT
Subject: Grad. Prog. in Cognitive Science?
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Santa Clara, CA