7.10—
Two Possible Responses

Now there are two kinds of objections that one might expect to hear at this point, each based on key differences between computers and paper or other passive media for the storage of symbols. First, computers do not just store individual symbols. The computer's sensitivity to the syntactic features of the symbols and its ability to generate new representations in accordance with formal rules allow the overall system to encode the semantic relationships between the symbols as well. If we ask how a symbol-manipulation process in a computer counts as, say, addition, we must not talk merely about the interpretations sanctioned by programmers and users, we must say something about the process that goes on in the computer as well. It looks as though the computer has its own contribution to make towards the symbols it stores having semantic values. If there is more to tell about the meaningfulness of symbols in computers than can be told in terms of the conventions and intentions of language users, the objections offered here may not undercut CTM's account of semantics and intentionality entirely.

Second, computers can be equipped with transducers that allow them to be sensitive to features of their environments. As a consequence, it is

possible for the tokening of symbols in a computer to covary in regular ways with the presence of particular kinds of objects and circumstances in their environments. If a computer is able to detect when a light has been turned on, and inscribes "The light has been turned on" whenever it detects the light being turned on, one might be inclined to think that such an inscription is about the light being turned on in a way that a random inscription of the same symbol string would not be about the light being turned on. One might well think that the computer paradigm suggests more than a semiotic explanation of the intentionality of mental states: if the mind is a computer, and computers can support causal covariations between objects in the environment and the tokening of symbols of particular types, this kind of causal covariation might well form an important part of the explanation of the intentionality of mental states as well.

In the following sections, I propose to argue that neither of these lines of argument can rescue CTM's account of intentionality. The first line of argument fails because one can talk about the systematicity of meaning relationships in a symbol system only if one can first talk about assignments of interpretations; systematicity contributes nothing to the assignment of interpretations. The second line of argument may present an interesting theory, but that theory is simply not CTM's representational account of the semantics and intentionality of cognitive states. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, there are additional problems for CTM that arise from the fact that syntax, as well as semantics, is conventional in character.