Rethinking the Chinese Room Argument

Feiruo Zhang

doi:10.54254/2753-7048/27/20231195

Research Article

Open access

Published on 7 December 2023

Download pdf

Zhang,F. (2023). Rethinking the Chinese Room Argument. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,27,229-236.

Export citation

Rethinking the Chinese Room Argument

Feiruo Zhang *^,1,

¹ Beijing Film Academy

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

https://doi.org/10.54254/2753-7048/27/20231195

Abstract

With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the long-lasting question was raised again in public debates, “Could a machine think?” When it comes to this profound issue, the famous Chinese Room Argument (CRA) invented by American philosopher John Searle must be considered. Since Searle first proposed the CRA in 1980, numerous scholars have discussed it over the past decades. However, there are still some problems regarding CRA such as why CRA is so powerful that it can always cause people’s confusion; could people use CRA to argue against nowadays artificial intelligence? These are the problems which will be discussed in this article. By reviewing Searle’s philosophical views and diverse replies to the CRA, the article will draw the conclusions that CRA is powerful because of intentionality, a key notion of Searle’s philosophy, and the CRA cannot be applied to the AI model which is widely used by most of nowadays AI, connectionism.

Keywords

the Chinese Room Argument, artificial intelligence, connectionism

View pdf

References

[1]. Searle, J. R. (1984). Minds, brains and science. Harvard university press.

[2]. Cole, David, "The Chinese Room Argument", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/chinese-room/>

[3]. Hornsby, David (2014) Linguistics: A Complete Introduction. Teach yourself books. Hodder & Stoughton, London, UK. 134.

[4]. Jacob, Pierre, "Intentionality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/intentionality/>

[5]. L. Austin. (1975) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 94-103.

[6]. Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge university press.

[7]. Dinsmore, J. (2014) Thunder in the Gap. In: Dinsmore, J. The symbolic and connectionist paradigms: closing the gap. Psychology Press. 1-2. 2014.

[8]. Buckner, Cameron and James Garson, "Connectionism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/connectionism/>.

[9]. Churchland, P. M., & Churchland, P. S. (1990). Could a Machine Think? Scientific American, 262(1), 32–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24996642

[10]. Lee, Z. (2011). Viewing the Development of Artificial Intelligence from a Philosophical Perspective, A Critical inspection of The Chinese Room Argument. Journal of Henan Normal University, 06, 14-18. DOI:10.16366/j.cnki.1000-2359.2011.06.029.

Cite this article

Zhang,F. (2023). Rethinking the Chinese Room Argument. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,27,229-236.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Disclaimer/Publisher's Note

The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

About volume

Volume title: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies

Conference website: https://www.icihcs.org/

ISBN：978-1-83558-169-8(Print) / 978-1-83558-170-4(Online)

Conference date: 15 November 2023

Editor：Enrique Mallen, Javier Cifuentes-Faura

Series: Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media

Volume number: Vol.27

ISSN：2753-7048(Print) / 2753-7056(Online)

© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See Open access policy for details).