Over at Jotwell, Barbara Levenbook has posted "Meaning, Intention, and Mental States," reviewing "Artificial Meaning." Here is taste:
The core of the article is a thought experiment Solum calls “The Chinese Intersection,” in which an artificial intelligence system for a supremely complicated traffic intersection in Shanghai is described. The Shanghai Artificially Intelligent Traffic Authority, or SAITA, is created to govern a busy intersection involving several kinds of transportation systems. SAITA is programmed to monitor, on a moment-to-moment basis, vehicular, rail, and pedestrian traffic and, in order to insure the traffic’s smooth and safe flow, to alter signs, traffic lanes, and speed limits. SAITA can also make legal changes to the traffic regulations, post appropriate signs, and create legal texts. It can invent symbols for behavior newly outlawed or regulated; moreover, it has the capacity to create YouTube videos and engage in other campaigns of public education to inform about new regulations, new vocabulary, and so on. We are invited to envisage such a system operating successfully.
The beauty of this thought experiment is that if you find it coherent, you are forced to reject a number of philosophical claims, and to reevaluate others. For instance, you are forced to reject the conjunction of two claims: (1) marks don’t mean anything if not made with an intention to mean something (a view held by literary theorists Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, though Solum doesn’t note this), and (2) intentions are mental states. You are also forced to reject this conjunction of views: (2) intentions are mental states, (3) communication is either successful or unsuccessful relative to a communicator and a recipient (hearer, reader, or viewer), and (4) successful communication requires that the communicator’s “communication” intentions be recognized by the recipient. By hypothesis, SAITA has no mental states. Yet its marks, even when vocabulary has been invented for new offenses in signage and legal texts, do mean something to the pedestrians, motorists, train crews, etc., who navigate the Chinese Intersection. Moreover, SAITA’s success, especially where it is truly innovative, seems to depend heavily on its ability to communicate to the appropriate addressees, sometimes rapidly in real time, the changes it introduces.
