Online research in philosophy

John R. Searle's problem of the Chinese Room poses an important philosophical challenge to the foundations of strong artificial intelligence, and functionalist, cognitivist, and computationalist theories of mind. Searle has recently responded to three categories of criticisms of the Chinese Room and the consequences he attempts to conclude from it, redescribing the essential features of the problem, and offering new arguments about the syntax-semantics gap it is intended to demonstrate. Despite Searle's defense, the Chinese Room remains ineffective as a counterexample, and poses no real threat to artificial intelligence or mechanist philosophy of mind. The thesis that intentionality is a primitive irreducible relation exemplified by biological phenomena is preferred in opposition to Searle's contrary claim that intentionality is a biological phenomenon exhibiting abstract properties.

The most famous challenge to computational cognitive science and artificial intelligence is the philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" argument.

This paper continues a strain of intellectual complaint against the presumptions of certain kinds of formal semantics (the qualification is important) and their bad effects on those areas of artificial intelligence concerned with machine understanding of human language. After some discussion of the use of the term epistemology in artificial intelligence, the paper takes as a case study the various positions held by McDermott on these issues and concludes, reluctantly, that, although he has reversed himself on the issue, there was no time at which he was right.

The intelligent-seeming deeds of computers are what occasion philosophical debate about artificial intelligence (AI) in the first place. Since evidence of AI is not bad, arguments against seem called for. John Searle's Chinese Room Argument (1980a, 1984, 1990, 1994) is among the most famous and long-running would-be answers to the call. Surprisingly, both the original thought experiment (1980a) and Searle's later would-be formalizations of the embedding argument (1984, 1990) are quite unavailing against AI proper (claims that computers do or someday will think ). Searle lately even styles it a "misunderstanding" (1994, p. 547) to think the argument was ever so directed! The Chinese room is now advertised to target Computationalism (claims that computation is what thought essentially is ) exclusively. Despite its renown, the Chinese Room Argument is totally ineffective even against this target.

The Chinese room argument has presented a persistent headache in the search for Artificial Intelligence. Since it first appeared in the literature, various interpretations have been made, attempting to understand the problems posed by this thought experiment. Throughout all this time, some researchers in the Artificial Intelligence community have seen Symbol Grounding as proposed by Harnad as a solution to the Chinese room argument. The main thesis in this paper is that although related, these two issues present different problems in the framework presented by Harnad himself. The work presented here attempts to shed some light on the relationship between John Searle’s intentionality notion and Harnad’s Symbol Grounding Problem.

The association of Wittgenstein’s name with the notion of artificial intelligence is bound to cause some surprise both to Wittgensteinians and to people interested in artificial intelligence. After all, Wittgenstein died in 1951 and the term artificial intelligence didn’t come into use until 1956 so that it seems unlikely that one could have anything to do with the other. However, establishing a connection between Wittgenstein and artificial intelligence is not as insuperable a problem as it might appear at first glance. While it is true that artificial intelligence as a quasi-distinct discipline is of recent vintage, some of its concerns, especially those of a philosophical nature, have been around for quite some time. At the birth of modern philosophy we find Descartes wondering whether it would be possible to create a machine that would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from..