John Searle (1932-2025): His contributions to the philosophy of the mind and language are towering

The life of a person is a bundle of stories – good, bad, and ugly. Their deaths force us to grapple with the question of which of these stories deserve to be told and why.

John Searle, one of the most astute and original philosophers of our time died on September 17. His enviably productive career – one that influenced an entire generation of philosophers through his remarkably clear, lucid, and analytically rigorous writings – ended under the shadow of allegations of sexual misconduct.

At a time when people are captivated by large language models, it has become pressing to ask whether artificial intelligence can actually “think” or understand what it does. Do such entities replicate the cognitive architecture of human minds when executing our commands, as many scientists would have us believe?

Although commonsense analysis might suggest an easy negative answer, John Searle recognised the philosophical depth of this question way back in the 1970s and challenged it with a compelling thought experiment known as the Chinese Room Argument.

The idea is elegant: an individual who does not understand Chinese could follow rules for manipulating Chinese symbols and produce flawless responses without comprehending what those symbols mean – either to themselves or to their audience.

The basic insight is...

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