The Turing Test, The Grice Test

Speranza

In 1978, when Grice published his "Further notes on logic and conversation", Sadock spoke of 'test' and 'testing' in connection with Grice.

---- INTERLUDE ON SADOCK ----

Jerrold (Jerry) Sadock is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. Inter alia, he founded the grammatical theory of Autolexical Syntax (aka Automodular Grammar). He is primarily a theoretical linguist, having written a number of influential works on noun incorporation, morphology and pragmatics, but is also an authority on West Greenlandic Eskimo and Yiddish. He received his B.A. in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965, and an M.A. in linguistics in 1967 and a PhD in linguistics in 1969 from the same institution.

---- END OF INTERLUDE ON SADOCK.

Now I will comment on Jones on Turing's test.

In "Why is the "Turing test" so bad?", Jones writes:

"Turing's imitation game is now referred to as "The Turing Test" and is taken by many (mostly computer scientists) to be a test of intelligence suitable for machines. Either for that purpose, or for more philosophical purposes such as the philosophical analysis of the term "intelligent", it's pretty bad (though it does, possibly because of its adoption by AI researchers and the ever growing reputation of Turing, engender huge amounts of philosophical debate). Why is that?  How could a man of Turing's genius come up with such a naf test of intelligence? The short answer is, I suspect, that he didn't."

 

Good implicature.

 

"Why is the 'Turing test' so bad?" Because it ain't!

 

(Cfr. "Why is the king of France bald?" "He ain't").

 

Jones goes on:

"One reason for doubting that he did [come up with such a naf test of intelligence] is the disclaimer in the first paragraph [of his 1950 "Mind" essay], in which [Turing] decouples himself from the ordinary mental vocabulary, making clear that the imitation game does not give an account of those terms but rather provides a more definite substitute."

 

This is what I think Jones sees as an 'explication', alla Carnap -- a bit like a 'rational reconstruction', perhaps.

Jones goes on:

"However, that's not my present concern. I want to suggest another reason to reconsider what Turing was trying to do, which possibly makes his enterprise more interesting philosophically than it might otherwise have been thought to be. In that opening paragraph, Turing is not actually decoupling himself from the term "intelligent".  He is considering alternatives to the question "can machines think?".  So even if he got that right, it would still fall short of answering the question "could a machine be intelligent?""

 

Exactly. I would think that 'intelligent', being an adjective, has quite a different logical grammar from the ubiquitious 'think'.

 

----

 

Note that, qua adjective, it allows for degrees, "very intelligent", "highly intelligent". Whereas to say that he is "rather thinking" seems to trigger a different implicature.

 

Jones:

"My impression from the paper is that what Turing is trying to do is as follows. He thinks that the brain, and perhaps also the mind, is a computational machine, and, having studied the limits of mechanical computation and invented (or discovered) the Universal Turing Machine (in the course of solving Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem) he is convinced that any computational task can be accomplished by a suitably powerful electronic computer."

 

Indeed. I am delighted by the things he ACKNOWLEDGES a computer can NOT do.

 

----- INTERLUDE ON TURING ON WHAT COMPUTERS CAN'T DO. Sixteen things computers can't do.

 

(1) be kind; (2) be resourceful; (3) be beautiful; (4) be friendly; (5) have initiative; (6) have a sense of humor; (7) tell right from wrong; (8) make mistakes; (9) fall in love; (10) enjoy strawberries and cream; (11) make someone fall in love with one; (12) learn from experience; (13) use words properly; (14) be the subject of one's own thoughts; (15) have as much diversity of behavior as a man; (16) do something really new.

 

--- END OF INTERLUDE

Jones:

 

"Turing is arguing that any intellectual feat which can be accomplished by a person can also be undertaken by computer, and it is that hypothesis which his experiment (the imitation game) is intended to test.   As it happens, humans are intelligent (often),"

 

I think Aristotle would see that as analytic:

 

"Homo rationalis est"

 

Socrates is rational as a consequence.

 

"Zoon logikon" in Greek.

 

-----

 

Jones:

 

"And this is perhaps the one human capacity which people least expect a machine to emulate, so this becomes the headline and the title. If Turing had been focussed on intelligence then he might have come up with something quite different, and perhaps even something which comes closer to a useful philosophical analysis of the term."

Indeed. I'm not sure a good introduction or handbook of Artificial Intelligence ever considers a bit of linguistic botany on how we use 'intelligence' (noun) and 'intelligent' (adj.). I know John Holloway, who back in the day (1951) wrote, "Language and Intelligence" did!

 

-----

 

Jones:

 

"In this regard it may be noted that a common approach of scientists in making terms of ordinary language suitable for use in science is quantification, and of course this has been done for intelligence.  Quantity of intelligence is conventionally rendered as a numeric Intelligence Quotient (IQ), a measure introduced way back in 1912 by William Stern (according to Wikipedia)."

 

And wonders about his background.

 

Stern, Wikipedia informs us, "introduced to intelligence testing the concept of the intelligence quotient or I.Q., the practice of dividing the developmental age by the chronological age."

 

"The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the Stern for the German term Intelligenz-quotient, his term for a scoring method for intelligence tests he advocated in a 1912 book. Vide Stern 1914, pp. 48–58 (1912 original German edition by Stern); 70–84 (1914 English translation by Whipple)."

 

Jones goes on:

 

"It is an interesting question (on which I can offer no enlightenment) what philosophers of language have made of IQ as contribution to the analysis of the term "intelligent"".

One thing is for sure: Whipple's translation seems pretty accurate!

 

Note that Stern uses "Intelligenz" as noun. And one may want to revise Whipple's 1914 English translation of Stern's 1912 book, to see how Stern distinguishes between the rather abstract notion (expressed by the abstract noun, "Intelligence" with capital "I" -- but then all nouns begin with a capital in German) and the more austere 'intelligent' qua adjective.

 

Jones: "Interestingly, the usual manner in which IQ is measured effectively anticipates an important feature of the imitation game, which is that the identity (and race, and species, and even whether alive or inanimate) of the subject is concealed from the examiner.  An IQ test as usually applied is eminently suitable for use on machines.  So why did Turing not just argue in his paper that machines would eventually score highly in the standard IQ tests?"

 

One reason may be as stated in "Imitation Game" -- I love that segment.

 

ALAN TURING: I don’t speak German.

COMMANDER DENNISTON: What?

ALAN TURING: I don’t. Speak German.

COMMANDER DENNISTON: How the bloody hell are you supposed to decrypt German

communications if you don’t, oh, I

don’t know, speak German?

ALAN TURING: I’m quite excellent at crossword

puzzles.

----

 

I suppose that Turing would have liked to read Stern in the original, and seeing he couldn't, he didn't. And that is that.

 

------

 

Jones continues, rather:

"The answer is I think that what Turing was aiming to do was not just assert that machines could be intelligent, but to assert that intelligence suffices for all the mental capabilities exhibited by humans, even those very far removed from the skills tested by an IQ test.  Probably he was wrong, as a lifelong believer in AI, I nevertheless believe that intelligence, even if, in some theoretical sense universal, will in practice be as varied in its practical effectiveness in machines as it is in humans."

 

I like that!

 

And there's EMOTIONAL intelligence, too, no?

 

Jones goes on:

"This idea that Turing was only en passant providing a test of intelligence, and intending primarily to argue a somewhat different thesis is a new one for me (today!).  But my dislike of the Turing Test as defining AI is very long standing and I am pleased to say that I am now inclined to think Turing innocent in this matter, and place the blame more firmly on those Computer Scientists who take the emulation of human intelligence as the primary goal of their discipline."

 

Good. And thanks for sharing your pleasure!

Jones:

"I confess that I am remote from the field, and that my impression of how dominant this attitude is may be quite wrong.  It certainly is not universal, here's a quote which shows work on the other way of testing intelligence discussed here: "Researchers at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have created a computer program that scored up to 150 on specific portions of an IQ test: identifying patterns in pictures and number sequences."

Good reference, thanks. Odd that Stern was into 'developmental psychology,' as it were, and that he

"introduced to intelligence testing the concept of the intelligence quotient or I.Q., the practice of dividing the developmental age by the chronological age."

 

It is also true that Turing was into developmental computational studies, too. Since he was saying that in fifty years from 1950, computers might pass the test easily.

 

But there may be differences between developmental psychology and developmental computer studies, as it were.

 

Jones goes on:

 

"[AI researchers] seem to have bottled out on the more verbal problems, though natural language understanding is now "going mainstream" as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others try to make their products responsive to verbal inputs."

 

A fascinating area is having computers recognizing implicatures. KEYWORD: computational pragmatics, implicature recognition.

 

Jones concludes:

"As far as analysis of the term "intelligence" is concerned, I am pretty confident that Grice would regard this kind of test, and use of the word "intelligence" to refer to what is assessed by it, as one small element in a much richer fabric, and might find that the grounds for any reductionist thesis (that intelligence in other forms might be somehow reducible to intelligence by this particular metric) are slender."

 

Perhaps he would start by Aristotle on 'logikon', as translated later by 'rationalis'. It is believed that when Grice engaged himself in 'philosophical psychology' he meant what pre-Kantian German authors (if not Kant himself) meant by 'psychologia rationalis'.

 

I.e. it would not be any 'psychological notion' that Grice would be interested in, but those associated with what he later would call 'aspects of reason and reasoning' (the original title for his Kant lectures at Stanford).