Menary on the A&A appeal to Searle

it is odd to use the demarcation as a principle of defining cognition, since the demarcation was introduced by John Searle (1980) precisely to attack classical cognitivism and to show that the symbolic representations beloved of classical cognitivism, including cognitive psychology and AI, were examples of derived representations.

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A&A have a somewhat different view of Searle's (1980) argument.  It's conclusion is that nothing gets to have semantic content simply in virtue of running a formal computer program.  So, the naturalized semantics stuff tries to provide an account of how something gets semantic content other than by simply running a formal computer program.  Not a bad fit, it seems to me.

I don't want to go so far as to say that the latter program arose as a response to the Chinese room argument, but there is a confluence between the Searle argument and the naturalized semantics stuff.

*http://www.alexandria.nu/ai/blog/entry.asp?E=50