 Tim Crane discusses the Chinese Room argument in his 1991 book, The Mechanical Mind. He cites the Churchlands’ luminous room analogy, but then goes on to argue that in the course of operating the room, Searle would learn the meaning of the Chinese: “…if Searle had not just memorized the rules and the data, but also started acting in the world of Chinese people, then it is plausible that he would before too long come to realize what these symbols mean.”(127). (Rapaport 2006 presses an analogy between Helen Keller and the Chinese Room.) Crane appears to end with a version of the Robot Reply: “Searle’s argument itself begs the question by (in effect) just denying the central thesis of AI – that thinking is formal symbol manipulation. But Searle’s assumption, none the less, seems to me correct … the proper response to Searle’s argument is: sure, Searle-in-the-room, or the room alone, cannot understand Chinese. But if you let the outside world have some impact on the room, meaning or ‘semantics’ might begin to get a foothold. But of course, this concedes that thinking cannot be simply symbol manipulation.” (129) The idea that learning grounds understanding has led to work in developmental robotics (a.k.a. epigenetic robotics). This AI research area seeks to replicate key human learning abilities, such as robots that are shown an object from several angles while being told in natural language the name of the object. 