If I tell someone to check for fools gold by rubbing it on a plate, nobody’s going to say “That test doesn’t work! What if it’s locked up inside a box so you can’t rub it on a plate?”
That’s just not what people mean when they say that a test works or doesn’t work. “This test works” means “this test works when the test is applicable”. The Turing test relies on the ability to communicate, and any statement about the Turing test working to detect minds has the implicit limitation “as long as you can communicate with the mind”.
The reason that the toddler doesn’t break the test isn’t that the test is a sufficient condition, it’s that that isn’t what “fails the test” means. “Fails the test” means “fails, when used on something that will communicate”.
For gold: the condition and the object are separate things: the streak is evidence for composition, which we can check by other means, and you can see whether you managed to rub the sample.
The Turing test has no access to a mind except through communicative performance. There is nothing, behind the conversation, that the test reaches; the conversation is the whole measurement.
So, the applicability clause does a different work in the two cases. “Works when you can rub it” is checkable. “Works when the subject can communicate” is not: to tell “can’t communicate” from “no mind there” you need independent knowledge of the subject, and that knowledge is what the test was supposed to give us. “I know my daughter’s failure means nothing” only because “I already know she has a mind” ; the test borrows its answer from what I knew before running it.
That’s just a quirk of the example. Imagine using a metal detector to find metal. Nobody would say that a metal detector “doesn’t actually detect metal” on the grounds that it can’t detect every single piece of metal, even ones that are too small. Yet the only way to know the difference between “too small” and “not made of metal” is to do something (like dig it up) that amounts to independently detecting it.
If not being able to detect uncommunicative minds made the Turing test a failure in a meaningful way, people wouldn’t have been talking about the test for decades.
If I tell someone to check for fools gold by rubbing it on a plate, nobody’s going to say “That test doesn’t work! What if it’s locked up inside a box so you can’t rub it on a plate?”
That’s just not what people mean when they say that a test works or doesn’t work. “This test works” means “this test works when the test is applicable”. The Turing test relies on the ability to communicate, and any statement about the Turing test working to detect minds has the implicit limitation “as long as you can communicate with the mind”.
The reason that the toddler doesn’t break the test isn’t that the test is a sufficient condition, it’s that that isn’t what “fails the test” means. “Fails the test” means “fails, when used on something that will communicate”.
For gold: the condition and the object are separate things: the streak is evidence for composition, which we can check by other means, and you can see whether you managed to rub the sample. The Turing test has no access to a mind except through communicative performance. There is nothing, behind the conversation, that the test reaches; the conversation is the whole measurement.
So, the applicability clause does a different work in the two cases. “Works when you can rub it” is checkable. “Works when the subject can communicate” is not: to tell “can’t communicate” from “no mind there” you need independent knowledge of the subject, and that knowledge is what the test was supposed to give us. “I know my daughter’s failure means nothing” only because “I already know she has a mind” ; the test borrows its answer from what I knew before running it.
That’s just a quirk of the example. Imagine using a metal detector to find metal. Nobody would say that a metal detector “doesn’t actually detect metal” on the grounds that it can’t detect every single piece of metal, even ones that are too small. Yet the only way to know the difference between “too small” and “not made of metal” is to do something (like dig it up) that amounts to independently detecting it.
If not being able to detect uncommunicative minds made the Turing test a failure in a meaningful way, people wouldn’t have been talking about the test for decades.