Citing Sources and Quoting Quotes

The quote below, from a blog by Wittgensteinian philosopher Reshef Agam-Segal, struck me as particularly interesting since it goes to the crux of many of our arguments here and in the past. Often when someone cites a claim or argument from another (a philosopher like Searle or Dennett or, needless to say, Wittgenstein) the response is something like 'prove that's what he said or didn't say, or prove that's what he meant or didn't mean.' It's as if the person posing that demand wants to say that there is a clear-cut received opinion concerning so and so's ideas about this which is clearly accessible to us in black and white if we just go read what he says. . . .

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Can Machines Get It?

Considers the nature of understanding and meaning in light of John Searle's argument (in the CRA) against the possibility of computational cognition.

It's long seemed to me that one of the serious flaws in [John Searle's Chinese Room Argument] . . . is its failure to elucidate [the] mysterious feature he calls semantics (i.e., the meaning of a symbol, word or statement, etc.). After all, if machines like computers can't have semantics, we ought to at least know what it is we think they are unable to possess. It can hardly be enough to suppose that what we find in ourselves, at moments of introspection, when we are aware of understanding a symbol, word or statement, isn't available to computers merely because we can't imagine it . . .

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