ABSTRACT
THE trouble with Artificial Intelligence is that computers don't give a damn—or so I will argue by considering the special case of understanding natural language. Linguistic facility is an appropriate trial for AI because input and output can be handled conveniently with a teletype, because understanding a text requires understanding its topic (which is unrestricted), and because there is the following test for success: does the text enable the candidate to answer those questions it would enable competent people to answer? The thesis will not be that (human-like) intelligence cannot be achieved artificially, but that there are identifiable conditions on achieving it. This point is as much about language and understanding as about Artificial Intelligence. I will express it by distinguishing four different phenomena that can be called “holism”: that is, four ways in which brief segments of text cannot be understood “in isolation” or “on a one-by-one basis.”
