A virtual person may understand Chinese
Maloney is right that the internalizing man doesn't understand Chinese, but there might be a virutal person in his brain who does understand Chinese.
There could even be two separate virtual people in the same brain, each of whomm understands a different language. The fact that none of the three people (the two virtual people and the man who internalized them) can translate their own language into the others' languages says nothing about their individual abililities to speak and understand their own languages.


David Cole, 1991.

Virtual Person: A formal implementation of the structure of human understanding. A virtual person is like a virtual machine, which is a machine that emulates another machine by instantiating its formal structure. For example, an old Atari video game console can be run as a virtual macine on a brand new Pentium computer.
Immediately related elementsHow this works
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Artificial Intelligence Â»Artificial Intelligence
Can computers think? [1] Â»Can computers think? [1]
Yes: physical symbol systems can think [3] Â»Yes: physical symbol systems can think [3]
The Chinese Room Argument [4] Â»The Chinese Room Argument [4]
The Systems Reply Â»The Systems Reply
The Internalisation Reply Â»The Internalisation Reply
Man understands Chinese but can't translate to English Â»Man understands Chinese but can't translate to English
Failure to translate proves failure to understand Â»Failure to translate proves failure to understand
A virtual person may understand Chinese
The Kornese Room thought experiment Â»The Kornese Room thought experiment
Cole confuses persons with personalities Â»Cole confuses persons with personalities
David Cole Â»David Cole
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