The Empiricist Reply
Empirical evidence suggests semantics can emerge from low-level syntax—e.g. a barcode reader. Similarly, high-level semantics may emerge from a robot with a self organising network that makes reasonable inferences from implicit information.
For example, a barcode reader is purely syntactic at a low-level, but at a higher level it represents information about how barcodes relate to sales, inventory and so forth.
James Moor, 1988.