Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 69 of 138
The Turing test as a kind of behaviorism
We need a test that will tell us when a machine is genuinely behaving intelligently, and when it is not. This test was also invented by Alan Turing, and is called the Turing test. There are different versions of it, but the basic idea is this: we can side-step all the great debates about the other minds problem, about whether or not there really is any thinking going on in the machine, whether the machine is really intelligent, by simply asking ourselves, Can the machine perform in such a way that an expert cannot distinguish its performance from a human performance? If the machine responds to questions put to it in Chinese as well as a native Chinese speaker, so that other native Chinese speakers could not tell the difference between the machine and a native Chinese speaker, then we would have to say that the machine understood Chinese. The Turing test, as you will have noticed, expresses a kind of behaviorism. It says that the behavioral test is conclusive for the presence of mental states.