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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 23:40:31 GMT
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In article <39posv$mr0@nnrp.ucs.ubc.ca> constab@unixg.ubc.ca (Adam Constabaris) writes:
>Mikal Ziane (Univ. Paris 5 and INRIA) (ziane@monica.inria.fr) wrote:
>
>: By the way, does anybody think that the Chinese room example could be 
>: improved, not to prove that a machine cannot be intelligent of course, 
>: but to clearly point out limitations of a purely behaviorist definition 
>: of AI like Turing's.
>
>I've just *got* to defend Turing from this (perhaps innocently made) 
>charge of "behaviorism".  Turing did *not* say "Anything which passes 
>this test is intelligent"; he would have probably said that the term 
>"intelligent" was ill-defined and thus that no clear-cut test could determine
>that a being was or was not 'intelligent'.

And one strand of behaviorism was redefining "mentalistic" terms.

>Maybe there have been proponents of AI (not to mention philosophical or 
>logical behaviorists) who have claimed that the Turing test gives us an 
>operational *definition* of "intelligence" or "thinking", but I don't 
>think that such a view is in any way a fundamental assumption of AI.

I agree.  Nonetheless, the TT is fiercely defended.

-- jd
