Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence
Intelligent behaviour in animals and robots
Intelligent behaviour in animals and robots
Cambrian intelligence: the early history of the new AI
Cambrian intelligence: the early history of the new AI
Understanding intelligence
Neural networks and analog computation: beyond the Turing limit
Neural networks and analog computation: beyond the Turing limit
Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction
Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction
Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence
Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence
Elementary Logic
Minds and Machines
Minds and Machines
Minds and Machines
Computationalism: New Directions
Computationalism: New Directions
The interrogator as critic: The turing test and the evaluation of generative music systems
Computer Music Journal
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John Searle's Chinese room argument (CRA) is a celebrated thought experiment designed to refute the hypothesis, popular among artificial intelligence (AI) scientists and philosophers of mind, that "the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind". Since its publication in 1980, the CRA has evoked an enormous amount of debate about its implications for machine intelligence, the functionalist philosophy of mind, theories of consciousness, etc. Although the general consensus among commentators is that the CRA is flawed, and not withstanding the popularity of the systems reply in some quarters, there is remarkably little agreement on exactly how and why it is flawed. A newcomer to the controversy could be forgiven for thinking that the bewildering collection of diverse replies to Searle betrays a tendency to unprincipled, ad hoc argumentation and, thereby, a weakness in the opposition's case. In this paper, treating the CRA as a prototypical example of a `destructive' thought experiment, I attempt to set it in a logical framework (due to Sorensen), which allows us to systematise and classify the various objections. Since thought experiments are always posed in narrative form, formal logic by itself cannot fully capture the controversy. On the contrary, much also hinges on how one translates between the informal everyday language in which the CRA was initially framed and formal logic and, in particular, on the specific conception(s) of possibility that one reads into the logical formalism.