Turing as Positivist

Roger Jones for The Grice Club

Turing's "imitation game" is sometimes thought of as providing a definition or analysis of the concept of thinking or of intelligence and as such it may seem crude by the side of the subtle analyses of language we find in Grice,

In twentieth century analytic philosophy the most profound cleavage between schools of thought might be seen as that between philosophers such as Russell who saw failures of reasoning as arising (at least in part) from pathologies in natural languages, and advocated the use of idealised formal languages as a remedy, and those whose interest was primarily in the analysis of those natural languages, warts and all (and would not recognise the features of which Russell complained as pathological).

To read Turing as if he belonged to the latter school may serve to illustrate some nice philosophical insights, but his opening paragraph in the classic paper surely places him firmly in the former camp:

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

Turing side-steps questions about thought and intelligence, substituting his imitation game.  Instead of claiming that computers can think, he claims that they will at some point succeed in some more sharply defined accomplishment.
This kind of side-stepping is common among those of a positivistic temper, and hence this is more like what Carnap might have done than the work of Grice.
There is still much room for debate about the merits of Turing's choice and the influence which that choice has had upon the development of the discipline of AI,

Glibert Ryle is an interesting philosopher in this regard.  He may easily be thought of as belonging to the latter camp with Grice his student, but this placement is easily contested.  One of his earliest papers places him close to Russell.  "Systematically misleading expressions" engages in analysis of just that kind of "pathology" in natural language which provoked Russell's advocacy of idealised languages. Later he might be blamed for sending off the infant terrible to Vienna facilitating Twentieth Century Positivisms most persuasive polemic "Language Truth and Logic".  Even his mature magnum opus seems to have as its principal objective one which a positivist might approve, the extirpation of the "Ghost in the Machine".   In this one might see Ryle as more positivistic than Carnap, whose ontological pragmatism might be more sympathetic to mental language.

Roger Jones