Abstract
I advocate a theory of “syntactic semantics” as a way of understanding how computers can think (and how the Chinese-Room-Argument objection to the Turing Test can be overcome): (1) Semantics, considered as the study of relations between symbols and meanings, can be turned into syntax – a study of relations among symbols (including meanings) – and hence syntax (i.e., symbol manipulation) can suffice for the semantical enterprise (contra Searle). (2) Semantics, considered as the process of understanding one domain (by modeling it) in terms of another, can be viewed recursively: The base case of semantic understanding –understanding a domain in terms of itself – is “syntactic understanding.” (3) An internal (or “narrow”), first-person point of view makes an external (or “wide”), third-person point of view otiose for purposes of understanding cognition.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abelson, R.P., 1968, “Simulation of social behavior,” pp. 274–356 in The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, 2nd edn., G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Ackerman, D., 1989, “Penguins,” The New Yorker, 10 July, 38–67.
Associated Press, 1997, “Opponent bytes at offer for draw with Kasparov,” Buffalo News, 7 May, A7.
Baum, L.F., 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, New York: Dover (1966 reprint).
Berman, J. and Bruckman, A., 1999, “The Turing game,” http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/turing/ Bunn, J.H., forthcoming, ‘Universal grammar or common syntax? A critical study of Jackendoff’ Patterns in the Mind,” Minds and Machines.
Carnap, R., 1928, The Logical Structure of the World, R.A. George (trans.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (1967).
Colby, K.M., Hilf, F.D., Weber, S., and Kraemer, H.C., 1972, “Turing-like indistinguishability tests for the validation of a computer simulation of paranoid processes,” Artificial Intelligence 3, 199–221.
Damasio, A.R., 1989, “Time-locked multiregional retroactivation,” Cognition 33, 25–62.
Dennett, D.C., 1971, “Intentional systems,” Journal of Philosophy 68, 87–106.
Ehrlich, K. and Rapaport, W.J., 1997, “A computational theory of vocabulary expansion,” pp. 205–210 in Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Elliott, C. and Brzezinski, J., 1998, “Autonomous agents as synthetic characters,” AI Magazine 19, 13–30.
Erion, G.J., 2000, “Common sense: An investigation in ontology, epistemology, and moral philosophy,” Ph.D. Diss., Philosophy Department, SUNY Buffalo.
Fetzer, J.H., 1994, “Mental algorithms: Are minds computational systems?,” Pragmatics and Cognition 2, 1–29.
Fodor, J.A., 1980, “Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology,” Behavioral and Brain Science 3, 63–109.
Hafner, K., 1999, “Guessing who is online,” The New York Times, July 22.
Harnad, S., 2000, “Minds, machines and Turing: The indistinguishability of indistinguishables,” Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 9, this issue.
Haugeland, J., 1985, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Hill, R.K., 1994, “Issues of semantics in a semantic-network representation of belief,” Tech. Rep. 94–11, Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Computer Science Department.
Hill, R.K., 1995, “Non-well-founded set theory and the circular semantics of semantic networks,” pp. 375–386 in Intelligent Systems: 3rd Golden West International Conference, E.A. Yfantis, ed., Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Hutchins, E., 1995a, Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Hutchins, E., 1995b, “How a cockpit remembers its speeds,” Cognitive Science 19, 265–288.
Jackendoff, R., forthcoming, “Bringing Patterns into focus: A response to Bunn,” Minds and Machines.
Johnson, G., 1997, “Ghost in the chess machine: Brain or box? Think about it,” The New York Times, 9 May, A1, B4.
Julesz, B., 1971, Foundations of Cyclopean Perception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Jurafsky, D. and Martin, J.H., 2000, Speech and Language Processing, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Kearns, J., 1997, “Propositional logic of supposition and assertion,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38, 325–349.
Lassègue, J., 1996, ‘What kind of Turing test did Turing have in mind?,’ Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 3, http://www.gold.ac.uk/tekhnema/3/lassegue/read01.html
Levy, S., 1997, “Man v. machine,” Newsweek, 5 May, 51–56.
Loebner, H.G., 1994, “In response [to Shieber 1994a],” CACM 37(6), 79–82.
Maida, A.S. and Shapiro, S.C., 1982, “Intensional concepts in propositional semantic networks,” Cognitive Science 6, 291–330.
Maloney, J.C., 1987, “The right stuff,” Synthese 70, 349–372.
Manin, Yu.I., 1977, A Course in Mathematical Logic, New York: Springer-Verlag.
McGilvray, J., 1998, “Meanings are syntactically individuated and found in the head,” Mind and Language 13, 225–280.
Morris, C., 1938, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago, IL: Unversity of Chicago Press.
Percy, W., 1975, The Message in the Bottle, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Quillian, M.R., 1967, “Word concepts: A theory and simulation of some basic semantic capabilities,” Behavioral Science 12, 410–430.
Quine, W.V.O., 1951, “Two dogmas of empiricism,” reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn., Rev., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 20–46.
Rapaport, W.J., 1978, “Meinongian theories and a Russellian paradox,” Noûs 12, 153–180; errata, 1979, Noûs 13, 125.
Rapaport, W.J., 1981, “How to make the world fit our language: An essay in Meinongian semantics,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 14, 1–21.
Rapaport, W.J., 1985, “Machine understanding and data abstraction in Searle' Chinese Room,” pp. 341–345 in Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rapaport, W.J., 1986a, “Philosophy, artificial intelligence, and the Chinese-Room Argument,” Abacus 3, Summer, 6–17; correspondence, 1987, Abacus 4, Winter, 6–7, Abacus 4, Spring, 5–7.
Rapaport, W.J., 1986b, “Searle' experiments with thought,” Philosophy of Science 53, 271–279.
Rapaport, W.J., 1988a, “To think or not to think,” Noûs 22, 585–609.
Rapaport, W.J., 1988b, “Syntactic semantics: Foundations of computational natural-language understanding,” pp. 81–131 in Aspects of Artificial Intelligence, J.H. Fetzer, ed., Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Rapaport, W.J., 1995, “Understanding understanding: Syntactic semantics and computational cognition,” pp. 49–88 in AI, Connectionism, and Philosophical Psychology, J.E. Tomberlin, ed., Phil. Perspectives, Vol. 9, Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Rapaport,W.J., 1996, Understanding Understanding: Semantics, Computation, and Cognition, Tech. Rep. 96–26, Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Computer Science Department; http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/96–26.ps.Z
Rapaport, W.J., 1998, “How minds can be computational systems,” Journal of Experimental, Theoretical and Artificial Intelligence 10, 403–419.
Rapaport, W.J., 1999, “Implementation is semantic interpretation,” The Monist 82, 109–130.
Rapaport,W.J. and Ehrlich, K., 2000, “A computational theory of vocabulary acquisition,” in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation, ?. Iwa´nska and S.C. Shapiro, eds., Menlo Park, CA/Cambridge, MA: AAAI/MIT (in press).
Schonberg, H.C., 1989, “Kasparov beats chess computer (for now),” New York Times, 23 October, A1, B2.
Searle, J.R., 1980, “Minds, brains, and programs,” Behavioral and Brain Science 3, 417–457.
Searle, J.R., 1982, “The myth of the computer,” New York Review of Books, 29 April, 3–6; cf. correspondence, same journal, 24 June 1982, 56–57.
Shapiro, S.C., 1979, “The SNePS semantic network processing system,” pp. 179–203 in Associative Networks, N. Findler, ed., New York: Academic Press.
Shapiro, S.C., 1995, “Computationalism,” Minds and Machines 5, 517–524.
shapiro/Papers/whatiscs.pdf
Shapiro, S.C., 1998, “Embodied Cassie,” pp. 136–143 in Cognitive Robotics: Papers from the 1998 AAAI Fall Symposium, Tech. Rep. FS–98–02, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI.
Shapiro, S.C. and Rapaport, W.J., 1987, “SNePS considered as a fully intensional propositional semantic network,” pp. 262–315 in The Knowledge Frontier, N. Cercone and G. McCalla, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag.
Shapiro, S.C. and Rapaport, W.J., 1991, “Models and minds: Knowledge representation for naturallanguage competence,” pp. 215–259 in Philosophy and AI, R. Cummins and J. Pollock, eds., Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Shapiro, S.C. and Rapaport, W.J., 1992, “The SNePS family,” Computers and Mathematics with Applications 23, 243–275.
Shapiro, S.C. and Rapaport, W.J., 1995, “An introduction to a computational reader of narrative,” pp. 79–105 in Deixis in Narrative, J.F. Duchan, G.A. Bruder, and L.E. Hewitt, eds., Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Shieber, S.M., 1994a, “Lessons from a restricted Turing test,” CACM 37(6), 70–78.
Shieber, S.M., 1994b, “On Loebner' lessons,” CACM 37, 83–84.
Simon, H.A. and Newell, A., 1958, “Heuristic problem solving: The next advance in operations research,” Operations Research 6(6), 1–10.
Simpson, J.A. and Weiner, E.S.C. (preparers), 1989, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon.
Smith, B.C., 1987, “The correspondence continuum,” Report CSLI–87–71, Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Srihari, R.K., 1991, “PICTION: A system that uses captions to label human faces in newspaper photographs,” pp. 80–85 in Proceedings of the 9th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91), Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT.
Srihari, R.K. and Rapaport, W.J., 1989, “Extracting visual information from text: Using captions to label human faces in newspaper photographs,” pp. 364–371 in Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Stork, D.G., 1997, HAL' Legacy, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Thagard, P., 1986, “Parallel computation and the mind-body problem,” Cognitive Science 10, 301–318.
Turing, A.M., 1936, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” reprinted, with corrections, 1965 in The Undecidable, M. Davis, ed., New York: Raven, pp. 116–154.
Turing, A.M., 1950, “Computing machinery and intelligence,” Mind 59, 433–460.
Wartofsky, M.W., 1966, “The model muddle,” pp. 1–11 in Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding, Dordrecht: Reidel (1979).
Weizenbaum, J., 1966, “ELIZA-A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine,” CACM 9, 36–45.
Williams, B., 1998, “The end of explanation?,” The New York Review of Books 45, 40–44 (19 November).
Woods, W.A., 1975, “What' in a link,” pp. 35–82 in Representation and Understanding, D.G. Bobrow and A.M. Collins, eds., New York: Academic Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rapaport, W.J. How to Pass a Turing Test. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 9, 467–490 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008319409770
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008319409770