La Pieza China: ¿un experimento mental con sesgo cartesiano? (The Chinese Room: A thought experiment with a Cartesian flavor?)

This article examines a classical thought experiment by John Searle in philosophy of mind, which Dennett and Hofstadter have accused as a non reliable intuition pump. As I argue here, although this thought experiment involves a Cartesian bias, this does not mean it is unreliable. Indeed, the Chinese Room most important feature is that it depends upon a conscious cognitive agent who performs  the experiment and, in particular, someone who cannot be jettisoned in order to know whether or not linguistic understanding takes place after symbol processing. Certainly, the first person viewpoint of the agent who carries out the experiment is, like in other instances, what allows one to test a hypothesis about the nature of the mind.