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From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle's Pearls
Message-ID: <635@spar.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-Nov-85 14:53:40 EST
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Posted: Sat Nov  2 14:53:40 1985
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>                                          Let's carry the above a step
> further, and have the man memorize a manual describing phonetic Chinese
> instead of written Chinese, and have him follow the rules to generate
> spoken responses to a *real* Chinese man who is talking to him.
> Suppose, in the middle of the conversation, the phone rings.  The
> Chinese man answers the phone, frowns, hangs up, then walks over to the
> rule-following man and says, in Chinese, "There's been a bomb threat.
> We have to leave the building."  The rule-following man responds in
> Chinese, saying "Let's go." Then he sits and waits for the Chinese man
> to say something else.
> 
> One step further: the manual not only describes the Chinese language,
> but uses some notation to represent sensory observations and movements
> of the body.  The man memorizes the manual and can carry out the rules
> at the normal speed of somebody who really understands Chinese.
> (Clearly he must be *very* talented.)  Repeat the bomb threat scenario,
> and he gets up from his chair and heads for the exit, but doesn't know
> why he's leaving.  There is no observable difference between
> understanding and the lack thereof.
> -- 
> David Canzi

Indeed, following Wittgenstein, one can argue that the man in question
most evidently *did* understand at least the sentence "we have to leave
the building", even though he might not be able to identify the individual
words within the sentence.  Of course, a real human could eventually learn
to isolate and recombine the individual words once he had seen them in
a variety of contexts and associated with appropriately related
"sensory observations and movements".

Having studied Wittgenstein under Searle years ago, I think that Searle
would maintain that it is precisely the isolation of language behavior
from other behavior in the Chinese room that implies a lack of
understanding.
						Baba