The Turing Test

The Turing test captures the ambiguities of 'intelligent', which is one of the reasons it is so compelling.

One of these is that it leaves moot the relevance of the internal structure of the talking machine.  This is just as well given the Kripke/Goodman paradox, and open question problems.  If the structure of the machine was relevant - if the machine need not only pass a specific finite test, but would also be required to pass all imaginable future tests of the same kind, then we'd be in trouble.

The OQ question here is obvious - that the programing of the machine would have to embody a general language competence engine, and therefore a theory of truth for the language the machine spoke.

The Kripke/Goodman problem is worth a further comment, though.  Clearly a machine that incorporated a flawed language generation program could pass the Turing test so long as the specific test circumstances did not reveal the flaws.  Would we say here that the test was imperfect?

If we did, then we would (as the paradox suggests) have to say that we could not conclude that any potential interlocutor was really an interlocutor (capable of intelligent conversation), and so that we could not conclude that any conversation was possible.  So far so Kripke, and I've already explained the problem here: if we can't say anything we can't articulate the paradox either, so there must be some other way of thinking about this.

Since we know that we can talk to one another, we don't need to worry about how, or why our words make sense.  In fact, we can only consider these questions if we already know that their answers can't 'legitimize' our use of language.

What this means is that we don't need to worry about whether we are all imperfect, accidental, Turing 'intelligences'.  What counts as intelligence is not intrinsic to the machine, but captured, instead, in the language game in which any question about 'intelligence' can arise - and this neither can be, nor needs to be, modeled in some mechanistic way.  It is the game within which formal modeling takes place, but which cannot, itself, be modeled (in its entirety).

So this aspect of the test's ambiguity cashes out nicely:  what counts as an intelligent machine is a judgement we make within a game which itself provides the unarticulable context for our judgments of intelligence, and of rationality.