How Helen Keller Used Syntactic Semantics to Escape from a Chinese Room
Minds and Machines 16 (4):381-436 (2006)
| 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. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
  |
| External links |
 Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesWilliam J. Rapaport (2006). How Helen Keller Used Syntactic Semantics to Escape From a Chinese Room. Minds and Machines 16 (4).
Jason Ford (2011). Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room. Minds and Machines 21 (1):57-72.
William Rapaport (2011). Yes, She Was! Minds and Machines 21 (1):3-17.
William Rapaport (2011). Yes, She Was! Reply to Ford’s “Helen KellerWas Never in a Chinese Room”. Minds and Machines 21 (1):3-17.
William J. Rapaport (2002). Holism, Conceptual-Role Semantics, and Syntactic Semantics. Minds and Machines 12 (1):3-59.
William J. Rapaport (2000). How to Pass a Turing Test: Syntactic Semantics, Natural-Language Understanding, and First-Person Cognition. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 9 (4):467-490.
William J. Rapaport (1988). Syntactic Semantics: Foundations of Computational Natural Language Understanding. In James H. Fetzer (ed.), Aspects of AI. Kluwer.
Hanoch Ben-Yami (1993). A Note on the Chinese Room. Synthese 95 (2):169-72.
William J. Rapaport (2000). How to Pass a Turing Test. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 9 (4):467-490.
Neal Jahren (1990). Can Semantics Be Syntactic? Synthese 82 (3):309-28.
William J. Rapaport (1995). Understanding Understanding: Syntactic Semantics and Computational Cognition. Philosophical Perspectives 9:49-88.
R. H. K., De Helene A. Keller & W. J. Greenstreet (1893). Helen Keller. Mind 2 (6):280 - 284.
Paul R. Thagard (1986). The Emergence of Meaning: An Escape From Searle's Chinese Room. Behaviorism 14 (3):139-46.
Justin Leiber (1996). Helen Keller as Cognitive Scientist. Philosophical Psychology 9 (4):419 – 440.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-12-22Total downloads15 ( #78,648 of 549,087 )Recent downloads (6 months)11 ( #6,038 of 549,087 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
