•  7
    Turing’s Wager?
    with B. Jacj Copeland
    Filozofia i Nauka. Studia Filozoficzne I Interdyscyplinarne 1 (11): 23-36. 2023.
  •  20
    Correction to: On Alan Turing's anticipation of connectionism
    with B. Jack Copeland
    Synthese 201 (2): 1-2. 2023.
  •  15
    Prosentential theory of truth in Dorothy Grover (1936-2017)
    Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers. 2022.
    In this entry, we offer a very brief overview of Dorothy Grover's prosentential theory of truth.
  •  22
    An Analysis of Turing’s Criterion for ‘Thinking’
    Philosophies 7 (6): 124. 2022.
    In this paper I argue that Turing proposed a new approach to the concept of thinking, based on his claim that intelligence is an ‘emotional concept’; and that the response-dependence interpretation of Turing’s ‘criterion for “thinking”’ is a better fit with his writings than orthodox interpretations. The aim of this paper is to clarify the response-dependence interpretation, by addressing such questions as: What did Turing mean by the expression ‘emotional’? Is Turing’s criterion subjective? Are…Read more
  •  510
    Rethinking Turing’s Test and the Philosophical Implications
    Minds and Machines 30 (4): 487-512. 2020.
    In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and…Read more
  • Enigma Variations (review)
    Times Literary Supplement 4970 6. 1998.
  • Two Lectures on Religion by Karl Popper
    In C. Jones, B. Matthews & J. Clement (eds.), Treasures of the University Canterbury Library, . pp. 173-177. 2011.
  •  156
    Recent work in social robotics, which is aimed both at creating an artificial intelligence and providing a test-bed for psychological theories of human social development, involves building robots that can learn from ‘face-to-face’ interaction with human beings — as human infants do. The building-blocks of this interaction include the robot’s ‘expressive’ behaviours, for example, facial-expression and head-and-neck gesture. There is here an ideal opportunity to apply Wittgensteinian conceptual a…Read more
  • How Human Can They Get? (review)
    Science 248 745. 1999.
  • More Human Than Human: Does The Uncanny Curve Really Matter?
    with Jakub Zlotowski and Christoph Bartneck
    In Proceedings of the HRI2013 Workshop on Design of Humanlikeness in HRI: from uncanny valley to minimal design, . pp. 7-13. 2013.
  •  1
    Alan Turing and evil AI
    OUPBlog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World. 2018.
  • We discuss, first, TUring's role in the development of the computer; second, the early history of Artificial Intelligence (to 1956); and third, TUring's fa- mous imitation game, now universally known as the TUring test, which he proposed in cameo form in 1948 and then more fully in 1950 and 1952. Various objections have been raised to Turing's test: we describe some of the most prominent and explain why, in our view, they fail.
  • Robots and Rule-following
    In Christof Teuscher (ed.), Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, Springer-verlag. pp. 359-379. 2004.
    Turing was probably the first person to advocate the pursuit of robotics as a route to Artificial Intelligence and Wittgenstein the first to argue that, without the appropriate history, no machine could be intelligent. Wittgenstein anticipated much recent theorizing about the mind, including aspects of connectionist theo- ries of mind and the situated cognition approach in AI. Turing and Wittgenstein had a wary respect for each other and there is significant overlap in their work, in both the ph…Read more
  •  1
    We set the Turing Test in the historical context of the development of machine intelligence, describe the different forms of the test and its rationale, and counter common misinterpretations and objections. Recently published material by Turing casts fresh light on his thinking.
  • Fictional Entities
    In S. Davies, K. M. Higgins, R. Hopkins, R. Stecker & D. E. Cooper (eds.), A Companion to Aesthetics. pp. 284-287. 2009.
  •  2
    Artificial Intelligence
    In E. Margolis, R. Samuels & S. Stich (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, . pp. 147-182. 2011.
    In this article the central philosophical issues concerning human-level artificial intelligence (AI) are presented. AI largely changed direction in the 1980s and 1990s, concentrating on building domain-specific systems and on sub-goals such as self-organization, self-repair, and reliability. Computer scientists aimed to construct intelligence amplifiers for human beings, rather than imitation humans. Turing based his test on a computer-imitates-human game, describing three versions of this game …Read more
  • Software Immortals—Science or Faith?
    In A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds.), The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment., Springer. pp. 367-389. 2012.
    According to the early futurist Julian Huxley, human life as we know it is ‘a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance’. With modern science, however, ‘the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted’ and human life could be ‘transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge’ (1957b, p. 16).
  •  1
    Connectionism: Computing with Neurons
    In Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Robin Wilson & Mark Sprevak (eds.), The Turing Guide, Oxford University Press. pp. 309-314. 2017.
  • Turing’s Concept of Intelligence
    In Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Robin Wilson & Mark Sprevak (eds.), The Turing Guide, Oxford University Press. pp. 301-307. 2017.
  •  1
    Child Machines
    In Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Robin Wilson & Mark Sprevak (eds.), The Turing Guide, Oxford University Press. pp. 315-325. 2017.
  •  1
    The Turing Test -- From Every Angle
    In Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Robin Wilson & Mark Sprevak (eds.), The Turing Guide, Oxford University Press. pp. 287-300. 2017.
  • The Legacy of Alan Turing (review)
    Mind 108 187-195. 1998.
  • Facts About Artificial Intelligence
    Science 285 835. 1999.
  •  1
    Alan Turing’s Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science
    Scientific American 280 (4): 99-103. 1999.
  • Turing’s tragedy
    Scientific American 281 (2): 4. 1999.
  • Wittgenstein’s Deflationary Account of Reference
    Language and Communication 22 (3): 331-351. 2002.
    Traditional accounts hold that reference consists in a relation between the mind and an object; the relation is effected by a mental act and mediated by internal mental contents (internal representations). Contemporary theories as diverse as Fodor’s [Fodor, J.A., 1987. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] language of thought hypothesis, Dretske’s [Dretske, F., 1988. Explaining Behaviour: Reasons in a World of Causes. MIT Press, Cambridge, M…Read more