Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <222@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 28 Feb 89 20:42:15 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <51157@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 29 In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes: >There is no reason whatever (apart from the preconceptions that >Searle's Argument was formulated to invalidate) (a) not to believe >him or (b) to believe that there is "someone/something" else in the >Chinese Room that IS understanding Chinese in the same sense that >you or I or Searle understand English. It is begging the question to say something else in the room is understanding chinese. But it's not necessary to show that there is something else in order to refute Searle -- all you have to do is show that Searle hasn't shown there isn't something else. Searle does try to show there isn't. Where the "systems argument" goes wrong is by saying "the system understands". But all it really has to do is find a system that Searle hasn't shown to lack understanding. >The difference is that the "external" criteria have not been shown to be >valid, and hence there is simply no justification for taking them to signal >the presence of understanding at all. To merely assume that they do is >not an argument; its just circularity again. Here I more or less agree. The external/behaviorist argument is also reather boring. Well, maybe some people only care about the behavior. That's fine, but some other people may be interested in other aspects too. And the behaviorist approach doesn't address these other issues at all, except to dismiss them.