Stuart Watt (1996) Naive Psychology and the Inverted Turing Test . Psycoloquy: 7(14) Turing Test (1)
Versions: ASCII formatted
Psycoloquy 7(14): Naive Psychology and the Inverted Turing Test

NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND THE INVERTED TURING TEST
Target Article by West on Turing Test

Stuart Watt
Department of Psychology
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK. MK7 6AA

s.n.k.watt@open.ac.uk

Abstract

This target article argues that the Turing test implicitly rests on a "naive psychology," a naturally evolved psychological faculty which is used to predict and understand the behaviour of others in complex societies. This natural faculty is an important and implicit bias in the observer's tendency to ascribe mentality to the system in the test. The paper analyses the effects of this naive psychology on the Turing test, both from the side of the system and the side of the observer, and then proposes and justifies an inverted version of the test which allows the processes of ascription to be analysed more directly than in the standard version.

Keywords

False belief tests, folk psychology, naive psychology, the "other minds" problem, theory of mind, the Turing test.

References