"We often attribute `understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts ... The sense in which an automatic door `understands instructions' from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English. ... I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing." (P 280bf)

Q. "[C]ould something think, understand, and so on solely by virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program?" (P 281b)

A. "[T]he answer ... is no. ... Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless. ... [T]hey have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output." (P 281b)