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Page 266
tants. A machine able to furnish interpretants for every expression it receives is an intelligent machine, that is, a machine able to understand expressions.
Smith: What happens if a machine does not furnish you with interpretants?
CSP: I have been told: Whereof one cannot hear, thereof one must be silent.
Smith: Would you say that to understand an expression and to grasp its meaning is the same thing?
CSP: I have some difficulties in understanding the meaning of meaning. I have so much information on this matter that I start looping. Let me put it my way. I have in my memory, for every expression I know (say, a word, an image, an algorithm, even certain musical sounds), a list of instructions. These instructions tell me how to interpret this expression according to a series of contexts. I call interpretants all the interpretations I can provide as a reaction to a given expression. Such a list could be infinite, and my masters, in order to make me manageable, gave me only partial lists of interpretations. I call these partial-lists-of-interpretations-for-a-partial-list-of-expressions encyclopedia. For every expression x, the whole of the interpretants assigned to x by all eneyclopedias represents the global content of x. Frequently, for reasons of economy, I consider only the content of x within a single encyclopedia. Anyway, the content of an expression is unbearably rich. Think of to be. . . . I am obliged to scan a lot of possible contextual selections. My interpretation in the case of I am sick is not the same as in the case of I am a linguist. I must select two different interpretants of to be. That is, when a given expression is uttered in a given context, I select the interpretants that, according to a given encyclopedia, fit that context. I guess that when I am doing this I am grasping, in your terms, the meaning of that expression. In the course of what we call a successful conversational interaction, this meaning corresponds to the meaning intended by the uttererbut I must be very careful on this matter. In poetry, for instance, things do not necessarily work like this.
Smith: Do you think that the sentence Every Antipodean has two legs tells the truth?
CSP: I would say that according to my information the majority of Antipodeans have two legs, even though there are many handicapped individuals. But if your question concerned the sentence All Antipodeans are two-leggedsuch is the form I use for defining the specific properties of a natural kindmy answer would be different. My encyclopedias are ways in which my masters represent and organize what

 
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