Science & Tech Quote by John Searle

Searle’s line lands like a dry punchline because it takes a familiar category mistake - treating machines as if they had minds - and shrinks it to absurd scale. A car and an adding machine “understand nothing” not because they’re badly designed, but because “understanding” isn’t even among the kinds of things they do. The blunt phrasing, “not in that line of business,” is doing real philosophical work: it reframes cognition as a type of activity with its own norms, not merely a set of outputs that can be mimicked. If you want a sum, the adding machine delivers. If you want meaning, you’re asking the wrong tool, the way you’d ask a toaster for literary criticism.

The context is Searle’s long fight against strong AI, crystallized in the Chinese Room argument: syntax is not semantics. Computers can manipulate symbols according to rules, yet still lack what we intuitively mean by understanding - intentionality, aboutness, the capacity for meaning to be present to a subject. The subtext is a warning to his era and ours: don’t let impressive performance seduce you into metaphysical inflation. Calling a system “intelligent” because it behaves intelligently is, for Searle, like calling a thermostat “anxious” because it reacts to temperature.

It’s also a rhetorical jab at tech triumphalism. By choosing mundane machines rather than sci-fi robots, Searle implies that the fallacy is ordinary: we anthropomorphize whatever talks back, then confuse our projection for proof.