How Helen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room
A computer can come to understand natural language the same way Helen Keller did: by using syntactic semanticsa theory of how syntax can suffice for semantics, i.e., how semantics for natural language can be provided by means of computational symbol manipulation. This essay considers real-life approximations of Chinese Rooms, focusing on Helen Kellers experiences growing up deaf and blind, locked in a sort of Chinese Room yet learning how to communicate with the outside world. Using the SNePS computational knowledge-representation system, the essay analyzes Kellers belief that learning that everything has a name was the key to her success, enabling her to partition her mental concepts into mental representations of: words, objects, and the naming relations between them. It next looks at Herbert Terraces theory of naming, which is akin to Kellers, and which only humans are supposed to be capable of. The essay suggests that computers at least, and perhaps non-human primates, are also capable of this kind of naming.
helen keller syntactic semantics sneps names herbert terrace animal communication chinese room argument knowledge representation natural-language understanding