Putnam, Searle and Boden on mental cognition versus machine cognition: the journey back to the beginning

Abstract

The main question of this paper is to account for the nature of mental states. Putnam’s hypothesis opines that the nature of mental states is analogous to the nature of machine states. Searle challenges Putnam’s hypothesis in the Chinese room experiment. The experiment shows that it is indeed possible to satisfy Putnam’s requirements for having a particular mental state without having the mental states in question. The question which is being pressed in this paper is whether, in view of Boden’s position, what actually constitutes meaning of codes and symbols, or whether codes and symbols, have independent meanings different from the transferred ones?. This is to examine whether Searle’s arguments still maintains its plausibility against Putnam’s computational hypothesis of the mind. The paper concludes that from Boden’s view, Searle’s justification for his challenge only raises the original question; the question concerning the nature of mental states.

Keywords: Chinese room, Computational Hypothesis, Symbols and Codes, Computer machine, Machine table