  In this paper we apply our understanding of the radical enactivist agenda to
the classic AI-hard problem of Natural Language Understanding. When Turing
devised his famous test the assumption was that a computer could use language
and the challenge would be to mimic human intelligence. It turned out playing
chess and formal logic were easy compared to understanding what people say. The
techniques of good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) assume symbolic representation is
the core of reasoning and by that paradigm human communication consists of
transferring representations from one mind to another. However, one finds that
representations appear in another's mind, without appearing in the intermediary
language. People communicate by mind reading it seems. Systems with speech
interfaces such as Alexa and Siri are of course common, but they are limited.
Rather than adding mind reading skills, we introduced a "cheat" that enabled
our systems to fake it. The cheat is simple and only slightly interesting to
computer scientists and not at all interesting to philosophers. However,
reading about the enactivist idea that we "directly perceive" the intentions of
others, our cheat took on a new light and in this paper look again at how
natural language understanding might actually work between humans.
