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Articles

Do Computers Have Syntax?

Michael Philips on the question of whether computers can think.

No philosophical argument has inspired as much anger and glee in the last hundred years as John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Given the hundreds, perhaps thousands of responses to Searle’s paper, it’s hard to believe that this will be the first to identify the central flaw in that argument. But every defense and criticism I’ve read accepts Searle’s claim that digital computers can’t think because they get their results in the wrong way. They get them by manipulating symbols that are meaningless to them according to rules. This is what Searle means when he says that computers have syntax.

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