WHOS AFRAID OF THE TURING TEST

The Turing Test is a verbal-behavioral operational criterion of artifi cial intelligence. If a machine can participate in question-and-answer conversation adequately enough to deceive an intelligent interlocutor , then it has intelligent information processing abilities. Robert M. French has argued that recent discoveries in cognitive science about s ubcognitive processes involving associational primings prove that the Turing Test cannot provide a satisfactory criterion of machine intelli gence, that Turing's prediction concerning the feasibility of building machines to play the imitation game successfully is false, and that t he test should be rejected as ethnocentric and incapable of measuring kinds and degrees of nonhuman intelligence. But French's criticism is flawed, because it requires Turing's sufficient conditional criterion of intelligence to serve as a necessary condition. Turing's Test is de fended against these objections, and French's claim that the test ough t to be rejected because machines cannot pass it is deemed unscientifi c, resting on the empirically unwarranted assumption that intelligent machines are possible.