Construct · 1 fields · 2 citations

Chinese room: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningTuring testcompare the meanings
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Chineseroom1 CONSTRUCTChinese roomSEARLE · CHINESE ROOM

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Philosophy of mind

The argument that running a program is not sufficient for understanding

John Searle's 1980 paper Minds, brains, and programs introduced the Chinese room as a thought experiment against the claim he called strong AI, the view that a suitably programmed computer literally understands and has a mind. Searle asks the reader to imagine a person who knows no Chinese sealed in a room, receiving Chinese characters through a slot and returning other Chinese characters by following an English rulebook that matches shapes to shapes: to those outside the answers look fluent, yet the person inside understands nothing of what is said. Searle's point, which he restated in a 1990 Scientific American essay, is that manipulating symbols by their formal shape (syntax) is never by itself enough to produce meaning or understanding (semantics), so running the right program cannot be sufficient for a mind. What makes the argument a landmark is its reach: it targets any purely computational account of understanding at once, framing the gap between symbol processing and genuine intentionality (the mind's capacity to be about or directed at things) that debate in cognitive science and philosophy of mind has argued over ever since.[1][2]

Unit
A thought experiment, a single argument in the philosophy of mind, not a measured quantity
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified by its canonical form in Searle's writing and by the standard replies to it (for example the systems reply and the robot reply); not operationalised as a variable

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Nearby constructs

argument3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructscapacity5 fields · 8 citationsjingle · one word, four limitsessay1 fields · 1 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–424. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756
  2. Searle, J. R. (1990). Is the brain's mind a computer program? Scientific American, 262(1), 26–31. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0190-26

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