Summary
Searle claims that for a machine to have intentional states it is not sufficient that a formal programme be instantiated. Various types of objections to this claim have been brought up by Searle's critics. Searle's replies to some of these objections are analysed. It turns out that it is more to these objections than Searle wants to make us believe. What is crucial, however, is that Searle's „Gedankenexperiment“ results in a dilemma. At the outset of the dilemma there are two ways of not understanding. According to one of these ways a person (Searle's homunculus) does not understand something without knowing that s/he does not understand. While in the other mode the person knows that s/he doesn't understand. In the first case the inference from facts about the homunculus to facts about the computer is not valid whereas in the second case one would attribute mental states to the computer. Thereby Searle's claim turns out to be unfounded.
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Schröder, J. Searles Kritik am Funktionalismus — Eine Untersuchung des Chinesischzimmers. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 22, 321–336 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01801213
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01801213