What Grice and Turing Are Doing -- KEYWORD: Philosophical Psychology

Speranza

I would think that as long as Turing thinks he is thinking about 'think', he is engaged in some kind of psychology which, since Grice was a philosopher, I would call 'philosophical psychology'.

A good illustration is his (albeit fictional) conversation with Detective Nock in "The Imitation Game". Since the film is based on Hodges's biography, something like this conversation must have taken place.

 

DETECTIVE NOCK (slightly out of the blue): Can machines think?

 

 

TURING: You’ve read my published work.

NOCK: What makes you say that?

TURING: Because I’m sitting in a police

station, accused of entreating a

man to touch my penis, and

you’re asking me whether machines

can think.

NOCK: Can they? Could machines ever think

as human beings do?

 

**************

 

Here Turing makes a lovely expansion on the disimplicature of "as", which in Valley dialect is 'like' -- "Can machines think LIKE humans do?"

 

 

 

 

TURING: Most people say no.

NOCK: You’re not most people.

TURING: The problem is that you’re asking a

stupid question.

 

----- [Or, as I would prefer: you are, like a Valley person, overusing 'like'].

NOCK: I am?

TURING: Of course machines can NOT think “as

human beings do.” A machine is

different from a human being;

hence, it would think differently.

The interesting question is, just

because something thinks

differently from you, does that

mean it’s not thinking? We allow

that humans have such divergences

from one another. You like

strawberries. I hate ice-skating.

You cry at sad films. I’m allergic

to pollen. What does it mean to

have different tastes — different

preferences — other than to say

that our brains work differently?

That we think differently from one

another? And if we can say that

about each another, why can’t we

say the same for brains made of

copper and steel?

NOCK: That’s... This big paper you

wrote... What’s it called?

 

 

TURING:

“The Imitation Game.”

NOCK:

Right. That’s what it’s about?

TURING

(thinking):

... Would you like to play?

NOCK:

Play?

TURING:

The game. It’s a test, of sorts.

For determining whether something

is a machine, or a human being.

NOCK: How do we play?

TURING:

There’s a judge, and a subject. The

judge asks questions, and based on

the subject’s answers, he

determines: Who is he speaking

 

with? What is he speaking with? All

you have to do is ask me a

question.

NOCK: What did you do during the war?

TURING: I worked in a radio factory.

NOCK [adding what Austin called a 'trouser word' -- "A sexist idiom if ever there was one" (Grice)]

 

What did you really do during the

war?

Turing smiles — Nock is smarter than he looks.

TURING

... Are you paying attention?

 ----

I provide the segment to expand or illuminate on Jones's apt observation that Ryle (and for that matter, Grice) and Turing were into different things.

Ryle and Grice would be analyzing the 'meaning' of 'mental' concepts (like 'think'), while Turing, more as if he were at Carnap's Corner, would be 'explicating' them.

I.e. he would be proposing implementations or applications or 'games' of counterparts of mental concepts.

Turing, as per the quote provided by Jones, is very clear about this, when Turing explicitly says he is NOT going to wonder about the 'meaning' of 'machine' and 'think' (i.e. an allegedly mental concept) but rather engage the reader in a thought experiment or game.

An explication, alla Carnap, as it were.

As Jones also notes, it may be that Carnap gives more room to 'mental' notions that Ryle would ever do!

Next would be to explore Turing's adventures in the U.S.A. (where Carnap also lived) and where he (Turing) got his doctorate.

Back in Cambridge, he was discussing with Witters, I believe, on the foundations of mathematics!