John Searle - Understand Quotes

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My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

John Searle

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

John Searle

The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.

John Searle

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

John Searle

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

John Searle

You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

John Searle