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Turing’s Philosophy of AI

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Abstract

This paper presents a short historical analysis of Alan Turing’s work on artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus on its early beginnings and philosophical nature, and argues that it remains fresh and inspiring even today. The discussion centres on how Turing typically approached philosophical questions concerning AI: namely, by introducing a conceptual device rooted in common sense to give a precise definition of some fundamental term, such as ‘intelligence’, ‘computer’, ‘learning’, or ‘thinking’. It is shown that Turing did not regard these definitions as true (metaphysical) definitions, and that the ultimate aim of this philosophical method was to enable clear and rigorous discourse and thus facilitate effective development of scientific theory.

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  • Logic in AI
  • History of Philosophy
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Notes

  1. A notable exception is Dennett 1985.

  2. As Turing showed, it does not follow that his ‘universal’ machine can compute all real numbers. In fact, he showed that it cannot.

  3. This shows that it would be wrong to think that Turing’s test was intended as nothing but a thought experiment. See also Gonçalves 2023; Moor 1976; 2001; Shieber 2007.

  4. Andrew Hodges has presented an alternative interpretation of the passage according to which “the puzzling reference to ‘mistakes’ […] is linked to the issue of the significance of seeing the truth of formally unprovable statements” (2019, Sect. 6). However, his evidence is weak. Furthermore, one need not find Turing’s talk of ‘occasional serious mistakes’ puzzling at all if one supposes that he has in mind learning methods such as genetic search.

  5. Turing was likely prevented from doing more public philosophy by his conviction for ‘gross indecency’ on 31 March 1952 under a British law prohibiting homosexual acts.

  6. Consequently, Diane Proudfoot’s (2013; 2020) account of this part of Turing’s philosophy of AI in terms of her response-dependence approach to intelligence seems to me to be an overinterpretation. See also Wheeler 2020.

  7. Perhaps the only important objection he failed to discuss is what I have elsewhere called ‘the biological objection against strong AI’. See Sunday Grève 2023; 2025.

  8. I for one can indeed remember speaking with friends about our chess computers in just that way around the turn of the century.

  9. Juliet Floyd (2016; 2023) has suggested—convincingly, to my mind—that Wittgenstein’s Blue Book was an influence on Turing’s 1936 paper, and that philosophical influence between these two thinkers occurred in both directions over the course of several years of regular personal meetings and exchanges. I believe that careful historical reconstruction of Turing’s philosophy of AI can show that the heart of this work consists in logical and conceptual investigations that proceed on the basis of what the later Wittgenstein called ‘language-games’, which Turing employed for the precise function Wittgenstein assigned to them, namely as “objects of comparison” (Wittgenstein 1953, Sect. 130; see also Kuusela 2022; Sunday Grève 2018).

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Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was generously supported by a fellowship from the Berggruen Institute. Earlier versions of this material have been presented at the Berggruen Institute, Kyoto University, National Taiwan University, Northeastern University London, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanxi University, Technische Universität Berlin, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Tokyo, and Wuhan University. I would like to thank both the participants and the organisers of these events for many useful discussions.

Funding

This research was funded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Talent Fund, Peking University (grant number 7101302578); the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Peking University (grant number 7100604441); and the Chinese Ministry of Education (grant number 22JJD720007).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Foreign Philosophy at Peking University, Beijing, China

    Sebastian Sunday Grève

  2. Department of Philosophy, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Sebastian Sunday Grève

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sebastian Sunday Grève.

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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Cite this article

Sunday Grève, S. Turing’s Philosophy of AI. J Gen Philos Sci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-024-09715-3

  • Accepted
  • Published
  • DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-024-09715-3

Keywords

  • Artificial intelligence
  • Turing machine
  • Computability
  • Turing test
  • Imitation game
  • Thought experiment

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