A.6.4—
The Nature of the Computer's Syntactic "Sensitivity"

But just what does the computer's "sensitivity" to syntactic structure amount to? In this sort of case, a computer may be said to be "sensitive to" a syntactic pattern P just in case (1) there is a functionally describable operation provided by the hardware or the programming which (2) takes marker strings as input and (3) whose output depends precisely upon whether the input string can be construed as having pattern P . What this most assuredly does not involve is any understanding of syntax on the part of the computer. The computer's "sensitivity to syntax" is a matter of computer operations on marker strings tracking conventionally sanctioned syntactic construals of those strings. The computer does not recognize syntactic patterns as syntactic patterns. To recognize something, it would have to be a cognizer; and to construe patterns as syntactic, it would have to be privy to the conventions of a language game. It may well be that it is logically possible for there to be computers which were also cognizers and could share our conventions; but it is not necessary to posit such things about actual computers in order to explain what they already do. For this all one need see is that the functional architecture of the computer and the programs it runs can be so designed that computer operations will be in a relationship of causal covariance with syntactic patterns licensed by (human) conventions.