Abstract

The modern project of naturalizing intelligence began in the middle of last century, and Alan Turing is one of its most celebrated proponents. The assumption that Turing shared the ontological and methodological commitments of canonical naturalists is based on certain widespread beliefs about Turing—namely, that his test of intelligence is behaviourist and his approach to the mind computationalist. This chapter argues that influential versions of these assumptions are false, and instead that, in his claim that intelligence is an ‘emotional concept’, Turing proposed a response-dependence approach to intelligence. Recent objections, however, take the response-dependence interpretation to commit Turing to anti-realism—a philosophical stance that is typically anathema to naturalists. This chapter argues that those objections fail.