Beyond Behavior: Why AI Evaluation Needs a Cognitive Revolution
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed replacing the question "Can machines think?" with a behavioral test: if a machine's outputs are indistinguishable from those of a thinking being, the question of whether it truly thinks can be set aside. This paper argues that Turing's move was not only a pragmatic simplification but also an epistemological commitment, a decision about what kind of evidence counts as relevant to intelligence attribution, and that this commitment has quietly constrained AI research for seven decades. We trace how Turing's behavioral epistemology became embedded in the field's evaluative infrastructure, rendering unaskable a class of questions about process, mechanism, and inte...
| Authors | Amir Konigsberg |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 7 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 April 2026 |
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