The Chinese Room Argument Analysis

John Searle is an American philosopher who is best known for his thought experiment on The Chinese Room Argument. This argument is used in order to show that computers cannot process what they comprehend and that what computers do does not explain human understanding. The question of “Do computers have the ability to think?” is a very conflicting argument that causes a lot of debate between philosophers in the study of Artificial Intelligence—a belief that machines can imitate human performance— and philosophers in the Study of Mind, who study the correlation between the mind and the physical world. Searle concludes that a computer cannot simply understand a language just by applying a computer program to it and that in order for it to fully comprehend the language the computer needs to identify syntax and semantics.

The way in which The Chinese Room example works is that suppose that a person who does not understand or speak Chinese at all is told to sit in a room with an input slot and an output slot. A person that understands Chinese slips Chinese characters through the slot hoping for a response in return. The person sitting in the Chinese room is given a set of formal rules for using the Chinese symbols; however, the rules do not tell him what the words mean, they just simply indicate what they should write back in response to the letters he has received through the input slot. These rules entail grammatically correct information to the receiver even though the person in the room has not idea what they are writing out; a similar—or same— concept that a robot has. The rules only mention the shape and order the characters should be presented—their syntax. This is where Searle argues the idea of semantics as one cannot come to ...

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...r. While it is accurate that understanding an expression or word consists of having behavioral dispositions this does not prove that our understanding is equal to these behavioral dispositions (Class Notes). Searle would possibly argue that understanding and behavioral dispositions even go together.

In all, John Searle’s conclusion that computers cannot simply understand a language just by applying a program to it and that what computers do does not explain human understanding is in some ways true and in other ways false. One can never simply put an end to philosophical topics of this type. Searle’s conclusions can be tested in many different ways, so one cannot simply conclude that syntax is necessary for semantics. With all of this, we have valid explanations to why Searle’s conclusions may be true, and also have no valid explanations as to believing that it is n