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Full Idea
It is by no means clear that any human could manage to do what Searle imagines himself to be doing in the Chinese Room - that is, short of throwing away the rule book and learning some real Chinese.
Gist of Idea
The person couldn't run Searle's Chinese Room without understanding Chinese
Source
Jaegwon Kim (Philosophy of Mind [1996], p.100)
Book Ref
Kim,Jaegwon: 'Philosophy of Mind' [Westview 1998], p.100
A Reaction
It is not clear how a rule book could contain answers to an infinity of possible questions. The Chinese Room is just a very poor analogy with what is envisaged in the project of artificial intelligence.
| 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] |