Diane Proudfoot

It is not widely realised that Turing was probably the first person to consider building computing machines out of simple, neuron-like elements connected together into networks in a largely random manner. Turing called his networks 'unorganised machines'. By the application of what he described as 'appropriate interference, mimicking education' an unorganised machine can be trained to perform any task that a Turing machine can carry out, provided the number of 'neurons' is sufficient. Turing proposed simulating both the behaviour of the network and the training process by means of a computer program. We outline Turing's connectionist project of 1948.

Cognitive science is held, not only by its practitioners, to offer something distinctively new in the philosophy of mind. This novelty is seen as the product of two factors. First, philosophy of mind takes itself to have well and truly jettisoned the ‘old paradigm’, the theory of the mind as embodied soul, easily and completely known through introspection but not amenable to scientific inquiry. This is replaced by the ‘new paradigm’, the theory of mind as neurally-instantiated computational mechanism, relatively opaque to introspection and the proper subject of detailed empirical investigation. Second, in the constitutive disciplines of cognitive science we have for the first time the theoretical, experimental and technological resources to begin this investigation. My concern here is to show that, despite its scientific and philosophical sophistication, the new paradigm is in certain striking ways very similar to the old paradigm and that Wittgenstein's criticisms of the former apply to much of the latter.

  Given (1) Wittgensteins externalist analysis of the distinction between following a rule and behaving in accordance with a rule, (2) prima facie connections between rule-following and psychological capacities, and (3) pragmatic issues about training, it follows that most, even all, future artificially intelligent computers and robots will not use language, possess concepts, or reason. This argument suggests that AIs traditional aim of building machines with minds, exemplified in current work on cognitive robotics, is in need of substantial revision