Abstract
John Searle's famous thought experiment concerning the Chinese Room (CR) is cast rhetorically in terms that are standard for the target it seeks to defeat, the strong computational claims made about human intelligence by 'strong AI" (Searle 1980). Thus, the problem is laid out in terms of physics, syntax, and semantics. The CR argument demonstrates that semantics cannot be reduced to computational syntax – or that syntax by itself can never give you semantics (intentionality, meaning).