John Searle's Chinese Room Argument Summary

Searle’s Chinese Room Argument was first published in 1980 as an experiment where John Searle attempted to prove certain relationships and differences between artificial intelligence and the human brain. I’m going to argue that the explanations for his argument are inconclusive. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument was an experiment where Searle locked himself in a room and was fed slips of paper under the door in three stages. The first stage is called “a script”. In the first stage John is given a large amount of Chinese writing. John knows no Chinese whatsoever and cannot discern the writing from meaningless squiggles. In the second stage, called “a story” John is given English instructions on how to decipher the Chinese writing and correlate the words to English words. In the third batch called “questions” John is given Chinese writing with English …show more content…
Languages are communication tools and if one has the ability to communicate with that language then by all means and purposes that person has an understanding of the language. Chinese just like any other language is a means to communicate what we already know in our mind to other people. John using the instruction was able to communicate with someone outside the room in Chinese. To be able to communicate suggests that he already has a prior understanding of what he means to communicate he simply requires a tool to do so. The instructions in that room was John’s tool and he was able to communicate with someone outside giving him the so called perception of understanding. If communication is a means of perceiving what is in someone else’s head, then perception of understanding is all that a language is meant to actually accomplish. An understanding of the words themselves is taught to John by himself through the instructions given to