Here, for anyone not already familiar with it (and maybe some who are), is Searle’s original article along with commentary from a bunch of smart people and then Searle’s response to their comments. (The article was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which for each article solicits such commentary and then publishes them together.) The commenters include Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Hofstadter, Benjamin Libet, Marvin Minsky, Richard Rorty, and Roger Schank; it’s quite a star-studded list.
I think the reason for using Chinese is not so much that it has a reputation for being “mechanical and analytic” as Evan suggests, as that it has a reputation for being exceptionally incomprehensible to those who don’t know it, including in particular John Searle. He wanted a language for which the scenario he described would make it clearly impossible for him to have any inkling what the symbols he was pushing around mean.
Here, for anyone not already familiar with it (and maybe some who are), is Searle’s original article along with commentary from a bunch of smart people and then Searle’s response to their comments. (The article was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which for each article solicits such commentary and then publishes them together.) The commenters include Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Hofstadter, Benjamin Libet, Marvin Minsky, Richard Rorty, and Roger Schank; it’s quite a star-studded list.
I think the reason for using Chinese is not so much that it has a reputation for being “mechanical and analytic” as Evan suggests, as that it has a reputation for being exceptionally incomprehensible to those who don’t know it, including in particular John Searle. He wanted a language for which the scenario he described would make it clearly impossible for him to have any inkling what the symbols he was pushing around mean.