In this article, we demonstrate how computer-based analysis of different readings carried out by many readers – not necessarily professionals – produces a relatively minute picture. As an alternative, we offer a fusion approach, radicalising Moretti’s idea. Yet the problem of over-simplification remains, albeit differently. As is known, Moretti’s proposal became a ‘slogan’ for Digital Humanities while algorithmic manipulation of texts has taken the place of reading literary (human) histories. One of the weaknesses of this approach lies in its exclusive reliance on canonical and authoritative historiographies, one or two for each national literature, something which is bound to over-simplify the complexities of national literatures. However, that is not its ultimate aim: Turing is after a rich theoretical understanding of thinking in mechanical, i.e., computational, terms.įrom its very beginning, the term “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) was controversial, displacing ‘close reading’ by relying on literary histories and thereby reflecting on the entire global literary system. As it turns out, Turing’s conceptual engineering of the notion of intelligence is indeed quite similar to providing a precising definition with the aim of revising the usage of the concept. To complete this picture, his own conceptual network is analyzed through the lens of distributional semantics over the corpus of his written work. Even though many conceive his proposal as a prime case of operationalism, it is more plausibly viewed as a stepping stone toward a future theoretical construal of intelligence in mechanical terms. The Turing test is interpreted as an instance of conceptual engineering that rejects the role of the previous linguistic usage, but appeals to intuition pumps instead. In this paper, I propose to analyze his conception of intelligence by relying on traditional close reading and language technology.
His proposed test for intelligence remains influential. Alan Turing’s influence on subsequent research in artificial intelligence is undeniable.
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