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Others have made good responses, but from what you've said, I think you might be interested in Carl Hempel's paper "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," which runs through lots of the difficulties that you encounter when you try and develop a rigorous criterion of observability, testability, falsifiability, or what have you. Turns out it's very hard to even delineate hokum, much less show that philosophy is all that! Anyways, I mostly want to nitpick about Searle.
It's been some time since I read Searle on this topic, but I think that this interpretation, though common, is a misunderstanding of Searle's position. I recall thinking that he expresses his overall view more clearly in his article "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?"
Here's a comparison from Searle that I half-remember. Suppose you're interested in frogs - you want to explain some process they do, like vision. The full explanation of this should cite some underlying biological process in frogs; you might want to describe their eyes and nerves or whatever. It is not enough to omit the biology and say "there's a pattern x, and frog vision instantiates x." There's lots of things that instantiate whatever pattern, and you haven't really explained anything about frogs by saying that.
---"'understanding' means something functionally undetectable." Well, if you're the type to say that the system 'understands,' then this is true. Nothing then hinges on whether you call it 'understanding' or not, since the function/behavior of the Chinese room is the same either way. But that's exactly why this functional meaning of understand isn't what we actually mean by the word. Understanding is a process in human organisms, and we need a biological explanation rather than a abstract, mathematical, computational one. Comparison: JJ Thompson discovered the electron, and then we found out more about it. Humans discovered understanding a long time ago, but only now are cognitive scientists discovering more about it. Understanding is not just the observable criteria through which we coined the term, but the underlying, biological, physical process.
Now I actually disagree with the above reconstruction of Searle's view, since I think that the program of explaining the mind through computation has been rather successful, even if we might also like to have a biological explanation. (Although I hear that there's plenty of controversy in cognitive science about this.) Scott Aaronson also makes some compelling points about Searle's views in "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." But the usual objections to Searle are not good objections---like most famous philosophers, he has thought of the obvious replies.
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