Last year I put out quite a few posts concerning John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Well, I’ve returned to the subject to find that my comments and criticisms miss the point to some degree or another. Since I will be writing a decent sized paper on the subject over the next few weeks, you can expect to see a few posts of varying length in the near future.
Like most, I disagree with the Chinese Room Argument. This is about the most uncontroversial thing anybody can say on the subject. As soon as one attempts to move beyond a mere statement of disagreement, the waters tend to muddy. While I certainly plan to articulate a number of points where I see the argument going astray, in this post I merely wish to breifly address what I see as the main flaw in the argument.
Searle makes the serious mistake of confusing the syntax of representation with the representation of syntax. A Chinese speaker in a room is representing various sentences according to the syntax which underlies the Chinese language. Searle, while locked in the room with his program, is simply representing the syntax which underlies the Chinese language according to the syntax which underlies the English language. Consequently, nobody should expect him to understand Chinese, for this is not hte syntax of the representation scheme which he is implementing.
Furthermore, it is unclear, at best, to me whether the representation of the Chinese syntax by means of token-physicalism, could ever provide the basis for a Chinese mind of any kind. It certainly seems possible that type-physicalism could provide the stability for the implementation of such a program, but token-physicalism just seems too unstable. Thus, not only should we not expect Searle to not understand Chinese, we should not expect there to by any kind of virtual Chinese mind either.
