La pieza china: un experimento mental con sesgo cartesiano? / The Chinese room: a thought experiment with a Cartesian flavor?

Este ensayo examina un experimento mental clásico de John Searle en filosofía de la mente, cuyo argumento ha sido descalificado por Dennett y Hofstadter como una bomba de intuiciones no confiable. Lo que se defiende aquí es que este experimento mental tiene un sesgo cartesiano, pero ello no obsta para que no sea confiable. En efecto, la característica principal de la Pieza China es depender de un agente cognitivo consciente que realiza el experimento y, en particular, de quien no se puede prescindir para saber si ocurre o no entendimiento lingüístico luego del procesamiento de símbolos. En efecto, el punto de vista de la 1ª persona de quien lleva a cabo el experimento es, al igual que en otras instancias, lo que permite el testeo de una hipótesis sobre la naturaleza de lo mental.

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.

Externality and materiality as themes in the history of the human sciences

This article presents and discusses some attempts to overcome the "Cartesian" dualism of "mind versus matter" and "interior versus exterior", in particular the attempts of anthropologist Tim Ingold in his book "The Perception of the Environment" (2000). Central to Ingold's argument is a shift in focus from structure to process (temporality), from design to growth, from the organism in a context to organism and environment as co-evolutionary and co-constitutive entities. Ingold builds on ecological thinking (Bateson and Gibson) and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger). This article characterises Ingold's position as a neo-romantic reaction to the "linguistic turn" in the human sciences and the "genetic turn" in biology and compares his position to historical romanticism.(AU)