Page 99 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

100 John R. Searle

he doesn’t know that the story refers to restaurants and hamburgers, etc.), still
‘‘the man as a formal symbol manipulation system’’ really does understand Chi-
nese. The subsystem of the man that is the formal symbol manipulation system
for Chinese should not be confused with the subsystem for English.
So there are really two subsystems in the man; one understands English, the
other Chinese, and ‘‘it’s just that the two systems have little to do with each
other.’’ But, I want to reply, not only do they have little to do with each other,
they are not even remotely alike. The subsystem that understands English
(assuming we allow ourselves to talk in this jargon of ‘‘subsystems’’ for a
moment) knows that the stories are about restaurants and eating hamburgers,
he knows that he is being asked questions about restaurants and that he is
answering questions as best he can by making various inferences from the
content of the story, and so on. But the Chinese system knows none of this.
Whereas the English subsystem knows that ‘‘hamburgers’’ refers to ham-
burgers, the Chinese subsystem knows only that ‘‘squiggle squiggle’’ is fol-
lowed by ‘‘squoggle squoggle.’’ All he knows is that various formal symbols are
beingintroducedatone endand manipulatedaccordingto rules writtenin
English, and other symbols are going out at the other end. The whole point of
the original example was to argue that such symbol manipulation by itself
couldn’t be sufficient for understanding Chinese in any literal sense because the
man could write ‘‘squoggle squoggle’’ after ‘‘squiggle squiggle’’ without un-
derstanding anything in Chinese. And it doesn’t meet that argument to postu-
late subsystems within the man, because the subsystems are no better off than
the man was in the first place; they still don’t have anything even remotely like
what the English-speaking man (or subsystem) has. Indeed, in the case as
described, the Chinese subsystem is simply a part of the English subsystem, a
part that engages in meaningless symbol manipulation according to rules in
English.
Let us ask ourselves what is supposed to motivate the systems reply in the
first place; that is, what independent grounds are there supposed to be for saying
that the agent must have a subsystem within him that literally understands
stories in Chinese?As far as I can tell the only grounds are that in the example I
have the same input and output as native Chinese speakers and a program that
goes from one to the other. But the whole point of the example has been to try
to show that that couldn’t be sufficient for understanding, in the sense in which
I understand stories in English, because a person, and hence the set of systems
that go to make up a person, could have the right combination of input, output,
and program and still not understand anything in the relevant literal sense in
which I understand English. The only motivation for saying there must be a
subsystem in me that understands Chinese is that I have a program and I can
pass the Turing test; I can fool native Chinese speakers. But precisely one of the
points at issue is the adequacy of the Turing test. The example shows that there
could be two ‘‘systems,’’ both of which pass the Turing test, but only one of
which understands; and it is no argument against this point to say that since
they both pass the Turing test they must both understand, since this claim fails
to meet the argument that the system in me that understands English has a
great deal more than the system that merely processes Chinese. In short, the