 Cole (1991, 1994) develops the reply and argues as follows: Searle’s argument requires that the agent of understanding be the computer itself or, in the Chinese Room parallel, the person in the room. However Searle’s failure to understand Chinese in the room does not show that there is no understanding being created. One of the key considerations is that in Searle’s discussion the actual conversation with the Chinese Room is always seriously under specified. Searle was considering Schank’s programs, which can only respond to a few questions about what happened in a restaurant, all in third person. But Searle wishes his conclusions to apply to any AI-produced responses, including those that would pass the toughest unrestricted Turing Test, i.e. they would be just the sort of conversations real people have with each other. If we flesh out the conversation in the original CR scenario to include questions in Chinese such as “How tall are you?”, “Where do you live?”, “What did you have for breakfast?”, “What is your attitude toward Mao?”, and so forth, it immediately becomes clear that the answers in Chinese are not Searle’s answers. Searle is not the author of the answers, and his beliefs and desires, memories and personality traits (apart from his industriousness!) are not reflected in the answers and in general Searle’s traits are causally inert in producing the answers to the Chinese questions. This suggests the following conditional is true: if there is understanding of Chinese created by running the program, the mind understanding the Chinese would not be the computer, whether the computer is human or electronic. The person understanding the Chinese would be a distinct person from the room operator, with beliefs and desires bestowed by the program and its database. Hence Searle’s failure to understand Chinese while operating the room does not show that understanding is not being created. 