This document is a draft of an article for the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition (Elsevier, forthcoming). This article describes the Turing Test for determining whether a computer can think. It begins with a description of an “imitation game ” for discriminating between a man and a woman, discusses variations of the Test, standards for passing the Test, and experiments with real Turing-like tests (including Eliza and the Loebner competition). It then considers what a 1 computer must be able to do in order to pass a Turing Test, including whether written linguistic behavior is a reasonable replacement for “cognition”, what counts as understanding natural language, the role of world knowledge in understanding natural language, and the philosophical implications of passing a Turing Test, including whether passing is a sufficient demonstration of cognition, briefly discussing two counterexamples: a table-lookup program and the Chinese Room Argument.

This essay explores the implications of the thesis that implementation is semantic interpretation. Implementation is (at least) a ternary relation: I is an implementation of an ‘Abstraction ’ A in some medium M. Examples are presented from the arts, from language, from computer science and from cognitive science, where both brains and computers can be understood as implementing a ‘mind Abstraction’. Implementations have side effects due to the implementing medium; these can account for several puzzles surrounding qualia. Finally, an argument for benign panpsychism is developed.