The Chinese room thought experiment of John Searle militates against strong artificial intelligence, illustrating his claim that syntactical knowledge by itself is neither constitutive nor sufficient for semantic understanding as found in human minds. This thought experiment was put to a behavioural test, concerning the syntax of a finite algebraic field. Input, rules and output were presented with letters instead of numbers. The set of rules was first presented as a table but finally internalized by the participants. Quite in line (...) with Searle's argument, uninformed participants mastered the syntax but did not explicitly report semantic knowledge. In order to test the virtual mind reply to the Chinese room argument, the reaction time pattern of the participants was compared to that of an informed control group. The correlation was quite high but could be traced back to memory load and response priming, i.e. to syntactical factors. No trace of tacit semantic knowledge of the task could be found in the experimental group. (shrink)

The use of thought experiments seems to provoke much controversy, often in the form of charges of appeals to intuition. The notion of intuition, however, is vaguely defined in both the context of thought experiments and in philosophy in general. This vagueness suggests that the description of thought experiments is incomplete, and thus the prospect for their evaluation remains unfulfilled. Previous analyses of thought experiments have come largely from philosophy where the focus has been on truth value and validity. But (...) these approaches seem to view argument monologically; no accommodation of an audience response like intuition is possible. I try to show that van Eemeren and Grootendorst's pragma-dialectical model provides a framework for analyzing thought experiments and evaluating them because it treats thought experiments as part of a dialogue and as the result of a perspective. (shrink)