Naive psychology and the inverted Turing test

Abstract

This paper 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: naive psychology, the Turing test, the `other minds' problem, false belief tests, folk psychology, theory of mind. I. Introduction 1. In 1950 Alan Turing considered the question `Can machines think?' but almost immediately threw it away as "too meaningless to deserve discussion" and proposed to replace it with a more empirical test ---...

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