A Refutation of John Searle’s Famous Chinese Room Argument?

The Argument

The Chinese Room Argument (CRA) is a famous thought experiment conducted by the prominent philosopher John Searle that can be described as follows:

The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a 1980 article by American philosopher John Searle (1932– ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics.

(from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — here)

The gist of John Searle’s argument is that a computer that is only performing symbol manipualtion can only do syntax, but not semantics (and thus there can be no understanding).

The Source of the Counter Argument

Chomsky famously once gave the following sentences to underline the fact that probabilistic analysis of language does not explain language acquisition:

(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

Chomsky’s argument went (roughly) like this: (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical and are also equally unlikely to occur (at least at the time of his publication, both sentences were probably never seen in any corpus) and so a purely statistical analysis would/should assign both sentences a probability near 0 yet there is something clearly different about (1) and (2): speakers of ordinary language would consider (1) to be perfectly grammatical while this is not the case in (2). Thus, according to Chomsky, the ‘probablity’ of a sentence is a meaningless notion.

While Chomsky’s concern was language acquisition (and the poverty of the stimulus argument), there is another important side to this argument, namely this: while one can make a perfectly grammatical sentence that is (semantically) nonsensical, one cannot make a sensible (meaningful) sentence that is not grammatically valid (so “2 * (3 + 5)” could be meaningful — could be assigned a meaning/value, because it is, in the first place, grammatical; while “2 * 0 14 + / 51 0 62 * * +” could not be assigned a meaning because it is not even grammatical. In fact, that’s also why two expressions — e.g., “2 * (3 + 5)” and “7 + 9”, can have the same meaning/value although they have different syntactic strcutures)(see note [1], however).

The implication between syntax and semantics is thus one directional from semantics to syntax — that is,

IF (semantically valid) THEN (syntactically correct)

In Venn diagrams this corresponds to a set of syntactically valid sentences that is much bigger than the smaller subset of semantically valid or meaningful/sensible sentences (see figure 1). To state this in a slogan, we could say “no semantics without syntax” (incidentally, this is why one can argue that modern large language models (LLMs) have “learned” syntax from all the linguistic patterns they ingested, since they do generate not only syntactically fluent language, but also coherent and sensible language — i.e., since LLMs produce sensible language, they must have mastered syntax).

In any case what we will use in refuting John Searle’s argument is this fact: mere syntactic manipulation can lead to the generation of grammatically valid sentences, but it cannot ensure that the gramatically valid sentences are meaningful (or sensible). Thus, selecting a meaningful/sensible sentence implies doing more than syntax — whatever that ‘more’ is! Or, moving from the wider set of grammatically valid sentences and entering the smaller subset of meaningful sentences means doing more than ‘just’ syntax.

Figure 1. The set of semantically valid (sensible/meaningful) sentences are a subset of the set of all syntactically valid (grammatical) sentences — so, we could have a perfectly grammatical sentence that is nonsensical, but we cannot have a meaningful sentence if it’s not grammatical in the first place.

The Proof (the refutation of Searle’s CRA)

There are two options in considering the argument John Searle makes: (1) John Searle admits he can/might send back inappropriate Chinese responses because he does not understand Chinese; or (2) Searle insists he can send appropriate Chinese answers by just syntactic symbol manipulation and without any understanding. In the former case John Searle’s argument will be vacuous (or moot) because then there’s no claim of ‘understanding’ for him to deny. It is clearly the latter case that Searle is defending — namely that he can send appropriate Chinese answers to Chinese questions, without understanding a word of Chinese. This situation, however, cannot happen, as we argue below.

Here’s the proof:

1. The set of all grammatically (syntactically) correct responses includes — like it does in any language — semantically non-sensical sentences (aka Chomsky’s ‘colorless green ideas’ sentence).
2. Searle is sending only ‘appropriate’ (sensible) responses out of the Chinese Room.
3. By (1) and (2), Searle is selecting not only grammatically (syntactically) correct responses, but is selecting from a smaller subset of all those grammatically (syntactically) correct responses only ‘appropriate’ (sensible/meaningful) responses.
4. By (3), Searle (or the computer program manipulating symbols) understands — can identify — what responses are appropriate (meaningful) and is thus doing not only syntax, but is also doing semantics.

QED.

I am sure I am going to have many counter-counter arguments, but this was fun, nevertheless :)

Notes:
[1]in formal languages where the notion of ‘sensible’ or ‘nonsensical’ does not factor in, like the language of arithmetic in this case, the set of syntactically valid (grammatical) sentences and the set of semantically valid (meaningful) sentences are usually the same and so we have an if-and-only-if, but that’s another issue.