O argumento do quarto chinês à luz do naturalismo biológico de John Searle

Abstract

The Turing Test - as well as others where we have an observer/interlocutor and a system that we cannot know except through the behavior it exhibits while interacting with it - poses a question: when faced with something that is perfectly similar to a human in conversation, can we say that it thinks like us, in the strong sense or just metaphorically? There are two possible positions and their respective consequences: machines are not merely tools to investigate the functioning of the mind; they are, in fact, thinking systems endowed with cognitive states; or, if we disagree, it is necessary to rethink the status of language, what is different between my use and that of ChatGPT, for example. The contemporary American philosopher, John Searle, chose this path. He presented, in Philosophy of Mind, what he believed to be the definitive argument against his behaviorist and functionalist opponents: the Chinese Room Argument. However, there is still great dissent about its effectiveness and correctness, the conceptual definitions it relies on, and the truth of its premises. It appears that part of this disagreement may be due to the fact that John Searle's argument implicitly requires theories of mind, intentionality, and language, with a high density of philosophical content that mobilizes ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mind. Aware of this, we proposed Searle's Biological Naturalism as a means to explicate the not always clear assumptions in the Chinese Room Argument, because this promotes a better understanding of the argument. With our approach, we substantiate his main theses that support his original argument, explaining the ontology of the mind, intentionality as a genuine intrinsic characteristic of the mind, and thus the causal efficacy of the mind. After that, we return to the Chinese Room in light of Biological Naturalism to clarify some misunderstandings, both in the formulation of objections to Searle's argument and his responses. That said, we concluded that the Biological Naturalism implicit in the Chinese Room Argument is essential for our understanding of John Searle's reasoning.