creators_name: Brown, Steven Ravett type: journalp datestamp: 2000-10-11 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:23 metadata_visibility: show title: Peirce and Formalization of Thought: the Chinese Room Argument ispublished: unpub subjects: phil-mind full_text_status: public keywords: Peirce, Searle, Chinese Room, artificial intelligence, algorithm abstract: Whether human thinking can be formalized and whether machines can think in a human sense are questions that have been addressed by both Peirce and Searle. Peirce came to roughly the same conclusion as Searle, that the digital computer would not be able to perform human thinking or possess human understanding. However, his rationale and Searle's differ on several important points. Searle approaches the problem from the standpoint of traditional analytic philosophy, where the strict separation of syntax and semantics renders understanding impossible for a purely syntactical device. Peirce disagreed with that analysis, but argued that the computer would only be able to achieve algorithmic thinking, which he considered the simplest type. Although their approaches were radically dissimilar, their conclusions were not. I will compare and analyze the arguments of both Peirce and Searle on this issue, and outline some implications of their conclusions for the field of Artificial Intelligence. date: 2000 date_type: published publication: Journal of Mind and Behavior refereed: FALSE referencetext: 1. Boole, G. (1958). An investigation of the laws of thought (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Dover Publications. 2. Cariani, P. (1989). On the design of devices with emergent semantic functions. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY. 3. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained (1st ed.). Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. 4. Dreyfus, H. L. (1993). What computers still can't do: a critique of artificial reason (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 5. Habermas, J. (1995). Peirce and communication. K. L. Ketner (1st ed., Vol. 1). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 6. Harnad, S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D, 42, 335-346. 7. Houser, N., & Kloesel, C. (1991). The essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 8. Johnson, M. (1993). Moral imagination: implications of cognitive science for ethics (1st ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 9. Ketner, K. L. (1988). Peirce and Turing: comparisons and conjectures. Semiotica, 68(1/2), 33-61. 10. Lakoff, G. (1990). Women, fire, and dangerous things (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 11. Lakoff, G., & N?-ez, R. E. (1996). The metaphorical structure of mathematics: sketching out cognitive foundations for a mind-based mathematics. L. English . Hilldale, NJ: Erlbaum. 12. Peirce, C. S. (1992a). Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis. N. Houser, & C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings (Vol. Ipp. pp. 186-199). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 13. Peirce, C. S. (1992b). A Guess at the Riddle. N. Houser, & C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings (Vol. Ipp. pp. 245-279). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 14. Peirce, C. S. (1992c). Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man. N. Houser, & C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings (Vol. Ipp. pp. 11-27). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 15. Peirce, C. S. (1992d). Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. N. Houser, & C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings (Vol. Ipp. pp. 28-55). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 16. Searle, J. R. (1990). Is the brain's mind a computer program? Scientific American, 262(1), 26-37. 17. Searle, J. R. (1994). The rediscovery of the mind (5th ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 18. Siegelmann, H. T. (1999). Neural networks and analog computation: beyond the Turing limit (1st ed.). (Progress in Theoretical Computer Science) . Boston, MA: Birkhauser Boston. 19. Wiener, P. P. (1951). Extracts from the New Essays on the Human Understanding (Leibniz: selections) . New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons. citation: Brown, Steven Ravett (2000) Peirce and Formalization of Thought: the Chinese Room Argument. [Journal (Paginated)] (Unpublished) document_url: http://cogprints.org/1002/1/Peirce_Paper.html