Except a lot of natural language grammar is contextual, so there is no way to have a conversation that makes sense without an understanding (internal model) of the meanings of words and really together with the cultural context: literature, pop culture, current events etc. You may be able to produce valid sentences that still sound bogus though.
Searles Chinese Room argument although fundamentally flawed (the entire room or house is the conscious part) it says that although you can have a person spitting out the right translations the person is does not speak Chinese.
Um, I think there's a challenge with this analysis of the Chinese Room argument. The argument presupposes a perfect lookup table of (sentance -> sentance).
So the point of the argument is that given the correct responses, there's no way to tell if there is a contextual understanding.
Now you can say that such a table cannot possibly exist, but you would have to say why.
The Chinese room isn't a conversation thats the whole point. It actually unwillingly represents the neurons in my brain that doesn't understand Chinese either.
Searle is making the wrong analogy because all he shows is whats going on with the input/output when he really should show the entire house as the intelligent part.
