ABSTRACT
Turing’s celebrated 1950 paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, is dominated by the philosophical question that Turing asks at the outset: ‘Can machines think?’ It is a question whose import cannot be divorced from the resounding success of Turing’s version of Church’s Thesis (see Chapter 1). Moreover, if judged by the amount of interest which it has aroused, this question surely stands unrivalled in post-war analytic philosophy. And yet, as far as the foundations of AI are concerned, there is a definite sense in which this question places the emphasis on the wrong issue. Indeed, there is even a sense in which it places the emphasis on the wrong issue as far as Turing’s own interests are concerned. For over and over again we find him returning to the psychological question: Can thought be mechanically explained? This is a very different and, in many ways, a much more significant matter.
