Turing and Grice -- via Ryle

Speranza

The irony of the new film with Cumberbatch ("The Implicature Game", almost) is that the idea that computers might be able to think was put forward by Turing only one year after Gilbert Ryle wrote The Concept of Mind. 

Grice LOVED Ryle.

There would have been no ordinary language philosophy in Oxford (or elsewhere, for that matter) without this genius.

Now, the attack came from Cambridge, typically.

In his essay titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" published in the prestigious journal Mind: a journal of psychology and philosophy,  edited by, from all people, Ryle, Turing has the gall to ask us to consider this strange possibility. 

Can a machine like "Christopher" who, like this Polish mathematician, decoded Enigma, think?

To do this Turing constructs a thought experiment called the imitation game. 

I prefer to call it the IMPLICATURE game.

There are three players in this game: a male, a female, and an interrogator (the gender of this player doesn't matter -- for the interrogator.


The idea is that the interrogator asks questions to determine which player is the female. 

Well, you say, how hard can that be after all the interrogator just has to look. 

So we'll make it a little more difficult by placing each of the players in separate rooms. 

Still, it might be easy because the interrogator just has to listen for the female's voice -- he might be a countertenor.

  So we'll make the questions and answers written. 

But you can always recognize a female's handwriting so we'll make the responses typed. 

Now the payoff comes. 

Suppose we substitute for the male a computer. 

And suppose further that the computer could fool the stupid interrogator a statistically significant number of times. (Machines cannot catch an implicature -- neither could Turing, apparently).

Wouldn't we have to concede that the computer is thinking? 

Turing said yes. 

We should mention at this point that no computer, even the most advanced AI computers we have now, has ever passed this test; now called the Turing test.

Of course not everyone agreed with Turing's implicature, if he hinted one!

We know Grice didn't.

He disliked computers for two reasons:

They did not recognize 'pirot'.

They didn't recognize "sticky wicket".