more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
You should no more attribute understanding of Chinese to this one part of the system than you should ascribe the properties of the entire British Empire to Queen Victoria. This is the fallacy of division.
Gist of Idea
Searle is guilty of the fallacy of division - attributing a property of the whole to a part
Source
Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.2.3)
Book Ref
Rey,Georges: 'Contemporary Philosophy of Mind' [Blackwell 1997], p.274
A Reaction
This very nicely pinpoints what is wrong with the Chinese Room argument (nice analogy, too). If you carefully introspect what is involved when you 'understand' something, it is immensely complex, though it feels instant and simple.
| 2427 | Maybe understanding doesn't need consciousness, despite what Searle seems to think [Searle, by Chalmers] |
| 7389 | A program won't contain understanding if it is small enough to imagine [Dennett on Searle] |
| 7390 | If bigger and bigger brain parts can't understand, how can a whole brain? [Dennett on Searle] |
| 5789 | I now think syntax is not in the physics, but in the eye of the beholder [Searle] |
| 3496 | A program for Chinese translation doesn't need to understand Chinese [Searle] |
| 3384 | The person couldn't run Searle's Chinese Room without understanding Chinese [Kim] |
| 3216 | Is the room functionally the same as a Chinese speaker? [Rey] |
| 3220 | Searle is guilty of the fallacy of division - attributing a property of the whole to a part [Rey] |
| 2428 | Maybe the whole Chinese Room understands Chinese, though the person doesn't [Chalmers] |
| 6654 | A computer program is equivalent to the person AND the manual [Lowe] |
| 7335 | The Chinese Room should be able to ask itself questions in Mandarin [Westaway] |