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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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yaaqov wrote

What evidence is there that we perceive and comprehend language?

Taking another tack, syntactic rules (not exactly "pre-set", but acquired) are precisely what make up any speaker's syntactic competence . Of course a room can know a language, even if its parts don't! No individual subpart of my brain knows English, but I do.

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[deleted] wrote

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

Well, wouldn't the type of evidence that leads us to believe that humans have linguistic capacity be of the same type that leads us to believe that a non-human has linguistic capacity? It seems that Searle holds his language room to a different standard than he would a human speaker.

In fact, doesn't his view require a type of mind/body dualism in of itself? Doesn't Searle believe that philosophical zombies (which I understand to be something that extensionally acts exactly like a human but does not have consciousness) could logically exist? Isn't that itself dualistic?

I don't intend these questions to be rhetorical. I'm a total beginner in this territory.

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