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Searle freed of every flaw

  • Philosophy Of Mind
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Abstract

Strong Al presupposes (1) that Super-Searle (henceforth ‘Searle’) comes to know that the symbols he manipulates are meaningful, and (2) that there cannot be two or more semantical interpretations for the system of symbols that Searle manipulates such that the set of rules constitutes a language comprehension program for each interpretation. In this paper, I show that Strong Al is false and that presupposition #1 is false, on the assumption that presupposition #2 is true. The main argument of the paper constructs a second program, isomorphic to Searle’s, to show that if someone, say Dan, runs this isomorphic program, he cannot possibly come to know what its mentioned symbols mean because they do not mean anything to anybody. Since Dan and Searle do exactly the same thing, except that the symbols they manipulate are different, neither Dan nor Searle can possibly know whether the symbols they manipulate are meaningful (let alone what they mean, if they are meaningful). The remainder of the paper responds to an anticipated Strong Al rejoinder, which, I believe, is a necessary extension of Strong Al.

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References

  • Block, Ned: 1980, ‘Comment on John Searle’s “Mind, Brains, and Programs”,’ The Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 3, pp. 425–26.

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  • Dennett, Daniel: 1980, ‘Comment on John Searle’s “Mind, Brains, and Programs”,’ The Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 3, p. 429.

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  • Searle, John: 1980, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” with comments by various authors, and “Author’s Response”, The Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 3, pp. 417–457; reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett, The Mind’s I (Toronto: Bantam Books, Inc., 1981), pp. 353–73. All page references are to The Mind’s I.

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The title of this paper is an allusion to Girolamo Saccheri’s Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus (Euclid Freed of Every Flaw), printed and published in Milan in 1733, “only a few months before the author’s death” [Howard Eves, Great Moments in Mathematics After 1650 (The Mathematical Association of America, 1983), p. 67]. The difference, I believe, is that my argument does not fail to achieve its objective (as did Saccheri’s).

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Rodych, V. Searle freed of every flaw. Acta Anal 18, 161–175 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-003-1019-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-003-1019-7

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