Searle's Chinese
Room Argument

Chinese cartoon

Version 2.0

Back to HomeAnnotated Bibliography

Larry Hauser - Alma College

John Searle's (1980a) thought experiment and associated (1984a) argument is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., to claims that computers do or at least can (roughly, someday will) think. According to Searle's original presentation, the argument is based on two truths: brains cause minds, and syntax doesn't suffice for semantics. Its target, Searle dubs "strong AI": "according to strong AI," according to Searle, "the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states" (1980a, p. 417). Searle contrasts "strong AI" to "weak AI". According to weak AI, according to Searle, computers just simulate thought, their seeming understanding isn't real (just as-if) understanding, their seeming calculation as-if calculation, etc.; nevertheless, computer simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and other things).

The Chinese Room Thought Experiment


Replies and Rejoinders








Searle's "Derivation from Axioms"

Beside the Chinese room thought experiment, Searle's more recent presentations of the Chinese room argument (cf., Searle 1984a, 1994) feature - with minor variations of wording and in the ordering of the premises - a formal "derivation from axioms" (1989a, p. 701). The derivation, according to Searle's 1990aformulation proceeds from the following three axioms (1990a, p. 27):

(A1) Programs are formal (syntactic).

(A2) Minds have mental contents (semantics).


to the conclusion:


Searle then adds a fourth axiom (p. 29):

(A4) Brains cause minds.



whence we are supposed to derive the further conclusions:




Continuing Debate



The Connectionist Reply (as it might be called) is set forth - along with a recapitulation of the Chinese room argument and a rejoinder by Searle - by Paul and Patricia Churchland in (1990). The Churchlands criticize the crucial third "axiom" of Searle's "derivation" by attacking his would-be supporting thought experimental result. This putative result, they contend, gets much if not all of its plausibility from the lack of neurophysiological verisimilitude in the though experimental setup. Instead of imagining Searle working alone with his pad of paper and lookup table, like the Central Processing Unit of a serial architecture machine, the Churchlands invite us to imagine a more brainlike connectionist architecture. Imagine Searle-in-the-room, then, to be just one of very many agents, all working in parallel, each doing their own small bit of processing (like the many neurons of the brain). Since Searle-in-the-room, in this revised scenario, does only a very small portion of the total computational job of generating sensible Chinese replies in response to Chinese input, naturally he himself does not comprehend the whole process; so we should hardly expect him to grasp or to be conscious of the meanings of the communications he is involved, in such a minor way, in processing. Searle counters that this Connectionist Reply - incorporating, as it does, elements of both systems and brain simulator replies - can, like these predecessors, be decisively defeated by appropriately tweaking the thought experimental scenario. Imagine, if you will, a Chinese gymnasium, with many monolingual English speakers working in parallel, producing output indistinguishable from that of native Chinese speakers: each follows their own (more limited) set of instructions in English. Still, Searle insists, obviously, none of these individuals understands; and neither does the whole company of them collectively. It's intuitively utterly obvious, Searle maintains, that no one and nothing in the revised "Chinese gym" experiment understands a word of Chinese either individually or collectively. Both individually and collectively, nothing is being done in the Chinese gym except meaningless syntactic manipulations from which intentionality and consequently meaningful thought could not conceivably arise.

Summary Analysis

Searle's Chinese Room experiment parodies the Turing test, a test for artificial intelligence proposed by Alan Turing (1950) and echoing René Descartes' suggested means for distinguishing thinking souls from unthinking automata. Since "it is not conceivable," Descartes says, that a machine "should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as even the dullest of men can do" (1637, Part V), whatever has such ability evidently thinks. Turing embodies this conversation criterion in a would-be experimental test of machine intelligence; in effect, a "blind" interview. Not knowing which is which, a human interviewer addresses questions, on the one hand, to a computer, and, on the other, to a human being. If, after a decent interval, the questioner is unable to tell which interviewee is the computer on the basis of their answers, then, Turing concludes, we would be well warranted in concluding that the computer, like the person, actually thinks. Restricting himself to the epistemological claim that under the envisaged circumstances attribution of thought to the computer is warranted, Turing himself hazards no metaphysical guesses as to what thought is - proposing no definition or no conjecture as to the essential nature thereof. Nevertheless, his would-be experimental apparatus can be used to characterize the main competing metaphysical hypotheses here in terms their answers to the question of what else or what instead, if anything, is required to guarantee that intelligent seeming behavior really is intelligent or evinces thought. Roughly speaking, we have four sorts of hypotheses here on offer. Behavioristic hypotheses deny that anything besides acting intelligent is required. Dualistic hypotheses hold that, besides (or instead of) intelligent seeming behavior, thought requires having the right subjective conscious experiences.. Identity theoretic hypotheses hold it to be essential that the intelligent seeming performances proceed from the right underlying neurophysiological states. Functionalistic hypotheses such as Computationalism (the view that computation is what  thought essentially is) hold that the intelligent seeming behavior must be produced by the right procedures or computations.

The Chinese experiment, then, can be seen to take aim at Behaviorism and Functionalism as a would-be counterexample to both. Searle-in-the-room behaves as if he understands Chinese; yet doesn't understand: so, contrary to Behaviorism, acting (as-if) intelligent does not suffice for being so; something else is required. But, contrary to Functionalism this something else is not - or at least, not just - a matter of what underlying procedures (or programming) bring about the intelligent seeming behavior: Searle-in-the-room, according to the thought experiment, may be implementing whatever program you please, yet still be lacking the mental state (understanding Chinese) that his behavior would seem to evidence. Thus, Searle claims, Behaviorism and Functionalism are utterly refuted by this experiment; leaving dualistic and identity theoretic hypotheses in control of the field. Searle's own hypothesis of "biological naturalism" may be characterized sympathetically as an attempt to wed - or unsympathetically as an attempt to waffle between - the remaining dualistic and identity theoretic alternatives.

Implementation: An Underlying Issue

Of course, no one holds that programs in the abstract suffice for thought.  Though Searle sometimes speaks as if this were the view he is attacking (see, e.g., Searle 1999), we need to distinguish this - straw AI from views actually held and worth opposing.  Perhaps by "Strong AI," then, Searle is best understood to be mean the view that bare implementation suffices.  On this "High Church" view (as Hauser 1993a calls it) execution of a right program is all that's required - whatever the processing speed, whatever the external relations (especially causal relations), and whatever the implementing medium (silicon chips,  organic neurons, whatever).  This much appeal, to the bare fact of implementation, is required just by way of clarification of "Strong AI": an implementation reply would go further. The nub of Searle's would-be case against Computationalism being counterexemplification, the implementation reply - that  Searle in the room is not a right implementation (whether there are programs which, when rightly implemented, suffice for thought or not) - underlies several others.  This presents the question: What makes something an implementation and what (if anything) beyond that is required for being right (where, "right" means sufficient for thought). Though there is general agreement that implementing a program depends on internal causal processes and contingencies realizedin the machine mirroring (or being isomorphic to) computational  transitions and contingencies spelled out abstractly by the program, there is considerable disagreement as to the details and consequences of this.  Here, Searle insists that the mirroring exists only relative to our interpretations, making computation causally impotent, and rendering the concept computation unfit for scientific explanatory employment.  (Searle 1990c: cf., Searle 1999).   Beyond this foundational dispute, there is also disagreement concerning what further conditions (if any) have to be met to make the implementation right.

Speed limits (cf., Dennett 1987, Hauser 1993a) are the least adulterating would-be additions.  These are well rooted both in computational theory (reference to time being a key part of what distinguishes computations among  formalisms) and in commonsense intuitions about intelligence (evident, e.g., in talk of people being mentally "quick" and "slow").  Though speed limits have a theoretical cost - Turing's proof of the universality of the machines he describes only holds "considerations of speed apart" (Turing 1950, p. 441) - this cost may be counted a benefit insofar as it reconnects with issues of AI proper (cf., Hauser 1997) about whether actual (or forthcoming) machines really are (or someday will be) thinking; insofar, that is, as it reconnects with real experiments developing actual implementations, like SAM, and disconnects from thought experiments invoking impossible ones, like the Chinese room.

Requiring addition of causal (and in particular sensory and motoric) relations to the referents of the "data" processed in order for the processing to be thought is the "robot reply" (1980a, p. 420).  While this is a more considerable adulteration than speed limits, it is still in the spirit of computationalism, broadly construed.  A thing's computational character (i.e., what program it is executing) depends on its internal causal relations.  While adding external causal relations is an amendment, it seems friendly enough.  Though it "tacitly concedes that cognition is not solely a matter of formal symbol manipulation" since it "adds a set of causal relation[s] to the outside world" (1980a, p. 420: my emphases), the robot reply is still a reply, not a retraction.  "Low Church" though it may be, the robotically augmented theory should still be deemed "computational."

Even appeal to inner causal powers or relations of the implementing medium besides those which give the implementation its computational character (or, additionally, its speed) needn't be altogether unfriendly as long as these elements are supposed to be required in addition to computation (cf., Rey 1986, p 181).  This - extracomputational details left unspecified - is Searle's anticipated "many mansions reply" (Searle 1980a, p. 422).  Searle, however, appeals to such material details of "implementation" in rebuttal to Computationalism; not as an amendment, but as an alternative to it.  Searle holds that (unconscious) computation is no part of any thought (causative) process: "computational operations . . .  by themselves have no interesting connection with understanding.  They are certainly not sufficient conditions, and not the slightest reason has been given to suppose that they are necessary conditions or even that they make a significant contribution to understanding" (Searle 1980a, p. 418: my emphasis).  His (1990f) "Connection Principle" according to which there can't be (nonintrospectably) unconscious computation and his Wordstar-on-the-wall argument according to which programs are not in their implementing media but rather "in the eye of the beholder" and consequently "have no causal powers at all" (1990c, p. 30) can be seen as attempts to buttress his claims about the causal impotence of computation (cf., Searle 1992, 1999).  But what Searle says to rebut the "many mansions reply" - that there is no "precise, well defined thesis" here, "no longer a testable hypothesis" for his objections "even to apply to" (1980a, p. 422) - applies equally to his own ritual invocation of unspecified "causal powers" of brains as a would-be alternative hypothesis to Computationalism.  Indeed, such rebuttal applies to Searle's would-be alternative to Computationalism in spades. Searle's chosen "causal powers," being powers to "give off consciousness" (1990c, p. 30), have no objective (publicly observable) effects, only subjective (privately introspectable) ones.  Searle's oft repeated brains cause consciousness "mantra," consequently, as Chalmers notes, "settles almost nothing."  It "is simply a statement of the problem, not a solution": "a real answer requires," according to Chalmers, "a detailed theory of the laws that bridge brain and consciousness" (in Searle 1999, p. 167)

Explanatory Gaps, Consciousness, and Intentionality: Neighboring Issues

On Searle's view (1) brains noncomputationally cause consciousness and (2) consciousness causes (or otherwise gives rise to) intentionality.  The nub of Chalmers' stage (1) complaint (above) is that the "explanatory gap" between computational or indeed any physicalistic sort of explanation and consciousness is one to which Searle's "biological naturalist" account will be equally subject whatever brain mechanisms are supposed to be involved.  Consequently, the existence of such an explanatory gap for Computationalism does nothing to support "biological naturalism" over against it.   Beyond this, regarding stage (2), Searle has confessed, "The real gap in my account is ... that I do not explain the details of the relation between Intentionality and consciousness."  He continues, "I am working on that now" (1991c, p. 181).  The fruit of that work seems to be his 1992 discussion of "The Connection between Consciousness and Intentionality" (original emphasis) in his The Rediscovery of the Mind where he proposes "there is a conceptual connection between consciousness and intentionality" such that "[o]nly a being that could have conscious intentional states could have intentional states at all, and every unconscious intentional state is at least potentially conscious" (1992, p. 132).  In support, Searle maintains,

  1. "[E]very intentional state has a certain aspectual shape" that is "part of what makes it the state it is" (p. 155).
  2. "Aspectual state can exist only subjectively "from the agent's point of view" (p. 157) or in consciousness.

"Aspectual shapes" are like Fregean senses or modes of presentation.2  On Searle's account, I can see or think of Venus as evening star or as morning star (under either of these aspects); I may want the water just as water (not as Evian) or as Evian not just as water; etc.  Every intentional mental state has such an aspect, and this aspect is what makes the state intentional (about what it's about): sense (aspectual shape) determines reference. A is also dubious ("direct reference" theories reject A); but the detailed account promised concerns B.  Searle 1992 argues negatively, at length (though not, I think, to good effect), that no "third-person, behavioral, or even neurophysiological" account "is sufficient to give an exhaustive account of aspectual shape" (p. 157-158: Searle's emphasis).  But where is the promised positive account of how consciousness suffices?  It is not forthcoming.  Searle just says, "it is reasonably clear how this works for conscious thoughts and experiences" (p. 157), and leaves it at that!  So, aspects are made of conscious experiences or qualia (somehow) and qualia (sometimes somehow) act as "metaphysical glue" (Putnam 1983, p. 18) sticking thought to things.  So much for details.


Debate over the Chinese room thought experiment - while generating considerable heat - has generated little agreement.  To the Chinese room's champions - as to Searle himself - the experiment and allied argument have often seemed so obviously cogent and decisively victorious that doubts professed by nay sayers have seemed discreditable and disingenuous attempts to salvage "strong AI" at all costs. To the argument's detractors, on the other hand, the Chinese room has seemed more like "religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious scientific argument" (Hofstadter 1980, p. 433) than a serious objection. Though I am with the masquerade party, a full dress criticism is, perhaps, out of place here (see Hauser 1993a and Hauser 1997).  I offer, instead, the following observations about the Chinese room and vicinity.

(1) Though Searle himself has consistently (since 1984) fronted the formal "derivation from axioms," general discussion continues to focus mainly on Searle's striking thought experiment. This is unfortunate, I think.  Intuitions about the experiment seeming to be irremediably at loggerheads, perhaps closer attention to the derivation could shed some light on considerable vagary of the argument and attending discussion.  Then again, perhaps not.  With so many weighty unmet criticisms against it, the least that can be said is that the Chinese Room Argument is hardly "simple and decisive" (cf., Searle 1999).  Whether it can further be fairly said of the Chinese Room Argument that "just about anyone who knows anything about the field has dismissed it long ago" as "full of well-concealed fallacies," as Dennett says (in Searle 1999, p. 116), depends on how you count experts.  I, for one, have dismissed it and do find it  full of fallacies (Hauser 1993, 1997a); though the argument still has defenders (cf.,  Bringsjord 1992, Harnad 1991).  It can, I think fairly, be said, that the Chinese room argument is a potent conversation starter, and has been a fruitful discussion piece.  Discussion of the argument has raised and is helping clarify a number of broader issues concerning AI and computationalism.  It can also, I think fairly, be said that Searle's arguments pose no clear and presently unmet challenge to claims of AI or Computationalism, much less, as Searle insists, "proof" ( Searle 1999, p. 228) against them.

(2) The Chinese room experiment, as Searle himself notices, is akin to "arbitrary realization" scenarios of the sort suggested first, perhaps, by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976, ch. 2), who "shows in detail how to construct a computer using a roll of toilet paper and a pile of small stones" (Searle 1980a, p. 423). Such scenarios are also marshaled against Functionalism (and Behaviorism en passant) by others, perhaps most famously, by Ned Block (1978). Arbitrary realizations imagine would-be AI programs to be implemented in outlandish ways: collective implementations (e.g., by the population of China coordinating their efforts via two-way radio communications) imagine programs implemented by groups; Rube Goldberg implementations (e.g., Searle's water pipes or Weizenbaum's toilet paper roll and stones) imagine programs implemented bizarrely, in "the wrong stuff." Such scenarios aim to provoke intuitions that no such thing - no such collective or no such ridiculous contraption - could possibly be possessed of mental states. This, together with the premise (generally conceded by Functionalists) that programs might well be so implemented, yields the conclusion that computation, the "right programming," does not suffice for thought; the programming must be implemented in "the right stuff." Searle concludes similarly that what the Chinese room experiment shows is that "[w]hat matters about brain operations is not the formal shadow cast by the sequences of synapses but rather the actual properties of the synapses" (1980a, p. 422), their "specific biochemistry" (1980a, p. 424).  (See above.)

(3) Among those sympathetic to the Chinese room, it is mainly its negative claims - not Searle's positive doctrine - that garner assent. The positive doctrine, "biological naturalism," is either confused (waffling between identity theory and dualism) or else it just is identity theory or dualism. (cf., Searle 1992).  (See above.)

(4) Since Searle argues against identity theory, on independent grounds, elsewhere (e.g., 1992, Ch. 5); and since he acknowledges the possibility that some "specific biochemistry" different than ours might suffice to produce conscious experiences and consequently intentionality (in Martians, say), and speaks unabashedly of "ontological subjectivity" (see, e.g., Searle 1992, p. 100), it seems most natural to construe Searle's positive doctrine as basically dualistic, and more specifically as a species of "property dualism" such as Thomas Nagel (1974, 1986) and Frank Jackson (1982) have espoused. Nevertheless, Searle frequently and vigorously protests that he is not any sort of dualist. He protests too much.  Refusing to call it "dualism" and inveighing against the very categories of materialism (on the one hand) and dualism (on the other) - the "deny the name stragegy" (cf. Searle 1992, ch. 1; Hauser 1993a, ch. 6) - does not change the basically dualistic character of Searle's views. Searle claims to "give a coherent account of the facts about the mind without endorsing any of the discredited Cartesian apparatus" (Searle 1992: 14), yet his "biological naturalist" account affirms (1) the essential ontological subjectivity of mental phenomena ("the actual ontology of mental states is a first-person ontology" (p. 16)) and its correlative "Connection Principle" that "[b]eliefs, desires, etc. . . . are always potentially conscious" (p. 17); (2) a distinction between true and as if mentality ("between something really having a mind, such as a human being, and something behaving as if it had has a mind, such as a computer" (p. 16)) such as Descartes deploys to deny animals genuine mentality, which Searle redeploys (with similar intent) against computers; (3) a methodological principle of privileged access according to which "the first-person point of view is primary" (p. 20);  (4) a distinction between primary ("intrinsic") and secondary ("observer relative") properties; and, perhaps most notably, (5) a Cartesian ego, i.e., "a `first person' an `I,' that has these mental states" (p. 20).  Searle even dots the "`I'"; as he should.

I do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what this "I" is, that now necessarily exists.  So I must be on my guard against carelessly taking something else to be this "I" and so making a mistake in the very item of knowledge that I maintain is most certain and evident of all. ( Descartes 1642, Second Meditation: p. 16)

Searle's "`I'" is no more identifiable with body or brain than Descartes': neither every property had (e.g., a grayish color), nor every event undergone (e.g., hemorrhaging), nor even every biological function performed by a brain  (e.g., cooling the blood) is mental.  Nor would it avail - it would be circular, here - to say, "thoughts are subjective properties of brains": it is precisely in order to explicate what it is for a property to be subjective that Searle introduces "a `first person' an `I' that has these mental states."  Given his acceptance of this and all the rest, it's hard to see what it is about Cartesian dualism - besides the name - Searle thinks "discredited." 

(5) If Searle's positive views are basically dualistic - and, connectedly, if the Chinese room argument is basically about consciousness as so many friends (cf., Harnad 1991, Bringsjord 1992) as well as critics (cf., Chalmers 1996, Dennett 1997, Hauser forthcoming) of the Chinese room argument alike recognize - then the usual objections to dualism apply (see Hauser 1993a, ch. 6), other-minds troubles among them.  The "other-minds" reply can hardly be said to "miss the point."  Indeed, since the question of whether computers (can) think just is an other-minds question, if other minds questions "miss the point" it's hard to see how the Chinese room speaks to the issue of whether computers really (can) think at all (cf., Searle 1992, Hauser 1993b).


Not Strong AI (by the Chinese room argument).
Therefore, Weak AI (they don't think: it's just simulation).

To show that thought is not just computation (what the Chinese room - if it shows anything - shows) is not to show that computers' intelligent seeming performances are not real thought (as the "strong" "weak" dichotomy here suggests). (cf., Hauser 1997, forthcoming).


1.  The "absurd consequence' mentioned here seemingly anticipates the universal realizabilty - Wordstar-on-the-wall - objection of Searle 1990c (cf., Searle 1992, Searle 1999).

2.  A Fregean sense, roughly characterized, is the manner in which one conceives of or picks out the referent of a word or other linguistic expression.  For instance, "The expressions `4' and `8/2' have the same denotation but express different senses, different ways of conceiving the same number. The descriptions `the morning star' and `the evening star' denote the same planet, namely Venus, but express different ways of conceiving of Venus and so have different senses. The name `Pegasus' and the description `the most powerful Greek god' both have a sense (and their senses are distinct), but neither has a denotation" (Zalta 1999). 

Annotated Bibliography                                                                                    Top of page