Searle and His Dilapidated Chinese Room

Searle and His Dilapidated Chinese Room

It is the objective of this essay to demonstrate that Searle's Chinese Room argument is fallacious on the grounds that it commits the fallacy of composition. Since it is fallacious on this account, the argument fails to adequately discount the Turing Test as an indicator of artificial intelligence. We shall substantiate our claim by executing the following: 1) discussing the Turing Test and its role in Searle's argument; 2) addressing the Chinese Room argument directly; 3) demonstrating that Searle's move from the homunculus to the wider system is unjustified and fallacious; and finally 4) expounding on this view by means of a quasi-dialogical form by incorporating Searle's retorts as we proceed through our claim. It shall become quite apparent that his responses to the Systems Reply do not introduce any new evidence for his case.

In the mid-twentieth century, Alan Turing fueled the classic debate of whether machines could think with his impressive insights. He introduced a scientific test for determining the success or failure of a thinking machine, or to be more specific, a thinking computer. The notion is fairly straightforward: if a computer can perform in such a way that an expert interrogator cannot distinguish it from a human, then the computer can be said to think. Since then, it has been the aim of artificial intelligence to design a system to pass this test.

Thirty years after Turing first formulated this test, John Searle put forth a thought experiment of a system that he claimed would pass the Turing Test. He claimed further, however, that any observer would clearly see that the system would not be able to think. We shall now attempt to expose the subtle logical fallacy in Searle's thought experiment, the Chinese Room argument.

The Chinese Room argument has prima facie merit and strength. He proposes this situation. Place an English speaking man ignorant to Chinese in a room with only a rulebook, which is written in English, and an input/output slot for communicating with the surrounding world. Now imagine that this man is asked questions written in Chinese and passed through the slot. The man is asked to follow the instructions in the book and then to output a response for the Chinese interrogators. We assume that the instruction book has codified all the rules needed to speak fluently by mere Chinese symbol manipulation. The man follows the rules perfectly and supplies flawless Chinese