handwaving and "content"

[AMR@ibm.com]

My point is not that there is nothing that distinguishes people
from, say, machines of the usual sort.  In fact, lots of things
do.   Rather, I contend that the sort of vague statements that
people make about content or semantics or intentionality or
the less vague ones about grounding do not help make that distinction.
Nor do any simplistic claims about biology vs. non-biology.

So, my point is to try to find where the difference does lie,
and to show that some initially appealing proposals for this
are either wrong (in the case of grounding) or too vague to be
either right or wrong (in some of the other cases).  The only
hope that I see for making the distinction is in terms of some
precise notions that either already exist or more likely (as my
slogan suggests) remain to be developed within a formal discipline
such as the theory of computation.