How Helen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room |
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Authors: | William J Rapaport |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Philosophy, Department of Linguistics, and Center for Cognitive Science, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-2000, USA |
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Abstract: | A computer can come to understand natural language the same way Helen Keller did: by using “syntactic semantics”—a 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 Keller’s 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 Keller’s 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 Terrace’s theory of naming, which is akin to Keller’s,
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.
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Keywords: | Animal communication Chinese Room Argument Helen Keller Herbert Terrace Knowledge representation Names Natural-language understanding SNePS Syntactic semantics |
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