Grice and Turing: The Conversation Game

Speranza

Grice and Turing: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

I'd like to analyse in some detail so-called fragments of a 'conversation' with a machine.

 

Can a machine 'implicate'?

In his essay, Turing

http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm

gives a sample of such a conversation:

A: In the first line of your sonnet which reads 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day', would not 'a spring day' do as well?

B: It wouldn't scan.

A: How about 'a winter's day'? That would scan all right.

B: But nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.

A: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminds you of Christmas?

B: In a way.

A: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.

B: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.

A: Well, I AM being serious.

B: Get lost!

For programming a computer to produce and recognise a conversational implicature (and citing A. M. Turing, "Computing machinery and intelligence", Mind 59,
http://www.cyborganic.com/People/jonathan/Academia/Papers/Web/cc-n-c....

For a pesimistic account:

 

"No context-sensitive automaton can ever master the rules of Grice's conversational implicature -- based as they are on heuristic abductive and defeasible problem solving reasing patterns, but maybe it
will.

 

Work by Reichmann, Grosz, etc.
http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/chapter%205.pdf

Etc.