- Lived:
- 1932–2025 · Denver, Oxford, and Berkeley, California
- Tradition:
- American analytic philosophy — language, mind, and society
- The Big Idea:
- Words don't just describe the world, they do things in it — and a machine that shuffles symbols, however fluently, is doing something very different from a mind that means them.
- In their words:
- "Brains cause minds."
- If you remember one thing:
- He built the Chinese Room — the most famous thought experiment of the computer age — and argued that running a program, no matter how convincing its output, is not the same as understanding.