The Reason That No Computer Program Can

Berkeley Had A Liberal Element In The Student Body Who Tended To Be Quite Active. I Think That's In General A Feature Of Intellectually Active Places.

Because We Do Not Understand The Brain Very Well We Are Constantly Tempted To Use The Latest Technology As A Model For Trying To Understand It. In My Childhood We Were Always Assured That The Brain Was A Telephone Switchboard...sherrington, The Great British Neuroscientist, Thought The Brain Worked Like A Telegraph System. Freud Often Compared The Brain To Hydraulic And Electromagnetic Systems. Leibniz Compared It To A Mill...at Present, Obviously, The Metaphor Is The Digital Computer.

It Seems To Me Obvious That Infants And Many Animals That Do Not In Any Ordinary Sense Have A Language Or Perform Speech Acts Nonetheless Have Intentional States. Only Someone In The Grip Of A Philosophical Theory Would Deny That Small Babies Can Literally Be Said To Want Milk And That Dogs Want To Be Let Out Or Believe That Their Master Is At The Door.

I Will Argue That In The Literal Sense The Programmed Computer Understands What The Car And The Adding Machine Understand, Namely, Exactly Nothing.

It Seemed To A Number Of Philosophers Of Language, Myself Included, That We Should Attempt To Achieve A Unification Of Chomsky's Syntax, With The Results Of The Researches That Were Going On In Semantics And Pragmatics. I Believe That This Effort Has Proven To Be A Failure. Though Chomsky Did Indeed Revolutionize The Subject Of Linguistics, It Is Not At All Clear, At The End The Century, What The Solid Results Of This Revolution Are. As Far As I Can Tell There Is Not A Single Rule Of Syntax That All, Or Even Most, Competent Linguists Are Prepared To Agree Is A Rule.