The Cartesian-Leibnizian Turing Test

The chapter examines the debate around the experimental validation of computer simulations of intelligent behavior. Under which conditions can we consider a machine intelligent? Since Turing’s original test, researchers have developed several criteria that have often generated lively debates about their adequacy. The author offers a new perspective. He recommends that we locate the evolution of Turing’s ideas in the historical development of the epistemology of ai. By showing that we might interpret contemporary criteria such as “behavior,” “formalism,” and “realism” as technical and pragmatical reformulations of philosophical conceptions of the mind that philosophers such as especially Descartes and Leibniz developed during the modern era, the author offers some reflections toward a hopefully fruitful new awareness and reemployment of those concepts.