Daniel C. Dennett The Intentional Stance

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Not psychoanalysis, but at least the adoption of the intentional stance will helpus do the reverse engineering we need to do to get any answers to this question.Fast Thinking9One last time let us reconsider John Searle's Chinese Room Argument(Searle 1980 and forthcoming).This argument purports to show thefutility of "strong AI," the view that "the appropriately programmeddigital computer with the right inputs and outputs would therebyhave a mind in exactly the sense that human beings have minds."(Searle, forthcoming) His argument, he keeps insisting, is "very sim-ple"; one gathers that only a fool or a fanatic could fail to be per-1suaded by it.I think it might be fruitful to approach these oft-debated claimsfrom a substantially different point of view.There is no point inreviewing, yet another time, the story of the Chinese Room and thecompeting diagnoses of what is going on in it.(The uninitiated canfind Searle's original article, reprinted correctly in its entirety, fol-lowed by what is still the definitive diagnosis of its workings, inHofstadter and Dennett 1981, pp.353-82.) The Chinese Room is notitself the argument, in any case, but rather just an intuition pump, asSearle acknowledges: "The point of the parable of the Chinese roomis simply to remind us of the truth of this rather obvious point: theman in the room has all the syntax we can give him, but he does notthereby acquire the relevant semantics." (Searle, forthcoming)Here is Searle's very simple argument, verbatim:Earlier versions of ideas in this chapter appeared in "The Role of the ComputerMetaphor in Understanding the Mind" (1984e) and portions are drawn from "TheMyth of Original Intentionality," in W.Newton Smith and R.Viale, eds., Modelling theMind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and reprinted with permission.1."It can no longer be doubted that the classical conception of AI, the view that 1 havecalled strong AI, is pretty much obviously false and rests on very simple mistakes."(Searle, forthcoming, ms.p.5)324The Intentional Stance Fast Thinking 325Proposition 1.Programs are purely formal (i.e., syntactical).will explain in due course.I am not convinced that proposition (D) istrue, but I take it to be a coherent empirical claim for which there isProposition 2.Syntax is neither equivalent to nor sufficient by itself forsemantics.something interesting to be said.I am certain, moreover, that (D) isnot at all what Searle is claiming in (S) and this Searle has confirmedProposition 3.Minds have mental contents (i.e., semantic contents).to me in personal correspondence and that my defense of (D) isConclusion 1.Having a program any program by itself is neitherconsistent with my defense of strong AI.sufficient for nor equivalent to having a mind.So anyone who thinks that no believer in strong AI could acceptSearle challenges his opponents to show explicitly what they think(D), or who thinks (S) and (D) are equivalent, or who thinks that (D)is wrong with the argument, and I will do just that, concentrating firstfollows from (S) (or vice versa), should be interested to see how oneon the conclusion, which, for all its apparent simplicity andcan argue for one without the other.The crucial difference is thatstraightforwardness, is subtly ambiguous.I start with the conclusionwhile both Searle and I are impressed by the causal powers of thebecause I have learned that many of Searle's supporters are muchhuman brain, we disagree completely about which causal powerssurer of his conclusion than they are of the path by which he arrivesmatter and why.So my task is ultimately to isolate Searle's supposedat it, so they tend to view criticisms of the steps as mere academiccausal powers of the brain and to show how strange how ultimatelycaviling.Once we have seen what is wrong with the conclusion, weincoherent they are.can go back to diagnose the missteps that led Searle there.First we must clear up a minor confusion about what Searle meansWhy are some people so sure of the conclusion? Perhaps partly, Iby a "computer program by itself." There is a sense in which it isgather, because they so intensely want it to be true.(One of the fewperfectly obvious that no program by itself can produce either of theaspects of the prolonged debate about Searle's thought experimenteffects mentioned in (S) and (D): no computer program lying unim-that has fascinated me is the intensity of feeling with which manyplemented on the shelf, a mere abstract sequence of symbols, canlay people, scientists, philosophers embrace Searle's conclusion.)cause anything.By itself (in this sense) no computer program canBut also, perhaps, because they are mistaking it for a much moreeven add 2 and 2 and get 4; in this sense, no computer program bydefensible near neighbor, with which it is easily confused.One mightitself can cause word processing to occur, let alone produce mentalwell suppose the following two propositions came to much the samephenomena with intentional content.thing.Perhaps some of the conviction that Searle has generated to theeffect that it is just obvious that no computer program "by itself" could(S) No computer program by itself could ever be sufficient to produce"produce intentionality" actually derives from confusing this obviouswhat an organic human brain, with its particular causal powers,(and irrelevant) claim with something more substantive and dubi-demonstrably can produce: mental phenomena with intentionalous: that no concretely implemented, running computer programcontent.could "produce intentionality [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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