Page 42 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

40 Daniel C. Dennett

But still, you may protest, something might pass the Turing test and still not
be intelligent, not be a thinker. What does might mean here?Ifwhatyou have
in mind is that by cosmic accident, by a supernatural coincidence, a stupid
person or a stupid computer might fool a clever judge repeatedly, well, yes, but
so what? The same frivolous possibility ‘‘in principle’’ holds for any test what-
ever. A playful god, or evil demon, let us agree, could fool the world’s scien-
tific community about the presence of H 2 O in the Pacific Ocean. But still, the
tests they rely on to establish that there is H 2 O in the Pacific Ocean are quite
beyond reasonable criticism. If the Turing test for thinking is no worse than
any well-established scientific test, we can set skepticism aside and go back to
serious matters. Is there any more likelihood of a ‘‘false positive’’ result on the
Turing test than on, say, the test currently used for the presence of iron in an
ore sample?
This question is often obscured by a ‘‘move’’ that philosophers have some-
times made called operationalism. Turing and those who think well of his test
are often accused of being operationalists. Operationalism is the tactic of defin-
ing the presence of some property, for instance, intelligence, as being estab-
lished once and for all by the passing of some test. Let’s illustrate this with a
different example.
Suppose I offer the following test—we’ll call it the Dennett test—for being a
great city:
A great city is one in which, on a randomly chosen day, one can do all
three of the following:
Hear a symphony orchestra
See a Rembrandt and a professional athletic contest
Eat quenelles de brochet a ` la Nantua for lunch
To make the operationalist move would be to declare that any city that
passes the Dennett test is by definition a great city. What being a great city
amounts to is just passing the Dennett test. Well then, if the Chamber of Com-
merce of Great Falls, Montana, wanted—and I can’t imagine why—to get their
hometown on my list of great cities, they could accomplish this by the rela-
tively inexpensive route of hiring full time about ten basketball players, forty
musicians, and a quick-order quenelle chef and renting a cheap Rembrandt
from some museum. An idiotic operationalist would then be stuck admitting
that Great Falls, Montana, was in fact a great city, since all he or she cares
about in great cities is that they pass the Dennett test.
Sane operationalists (who for that very reason are perhaps not operationalists
at all, since operationalist seems to be a dirty word) would cling confidently to
their test, but only because they have what they consider to be very good rea-
sons for thinking the odds against a false positive result, like the imagined
Chamber of Commerce caper, are astronomical. I devised the Dennett test, of
course, with the realization that no one would be both stupid and rich enough
to go to such preposterous lengths to foil the test. In the actual world, wherever
you find symphony orchestras, quenelles, Rembrandts, and professional sports,
you also find daily newspapers, parks, repertory theaters, libraries, fine archi-
tecture, and all the other things that go to make a city great. My test was simply
devised to locate a telling sample that could not help but be representative of