I recently asked a question about a scientific paper (Why is the Turing Test really a test about gender?), which got closed for being off-topic.
However, I would argue that the question is on-topic, because it asks answers to analyze an academic article using literary methods.
Is the question on-topic?
I was one of the close voters. I thought it was a really interesting question. However, any way I stack it up, it seems to me that it belongs somewhere else.
Let's start with asking about analyzing academic articles with literary methods. And we should be specific here: it's a scientific article. In my view, this is a non-starter, simply being a question of using the wrong tools for the job. Scientific papers are just not written to have literary value and they should present no ambiguity. Any to be found in them is the result of poor authorship, nothing more. You might as well ask whether it's okay to analyse a list of ingredients on the side of a food can with literary techniques.
Moving on to this exact instance, I'm not even sure that "literary methods" is what you're asking for here. You're asking "why" Turing put this ambiguity in his paper. There is no need to turn to literary methods to do this, and many answers have not. This is a question about the history of Turing's work and that is reflected in the answers it has received.
Next, let's consider whether we should consider it in terms how language impacts the scientific method. This is a very interesting field of study and one that's close to my own heart. However, academic treat this discipline very squarely as one of Sociology and Philosophy. There are of course links between social science, philosophy and literature, and authors like Derrida have contributed across all three fields. But most in the field belong to University Philosophy and Social Science departments and would agree that's where this subject belongs. There are already SE sites for those.
Finally, what if we're looking at this as a matter of ambiguous language in a scientific paper, trying to get to the bottom of what an author actually indented? In that case I would argue you were better off consulting experts in the same academic field. There are multiple SE sites dealing with computer science, and one each for the physical sciences.
Questions like this are good questions. But just not for this SE.
(Background: I'm a former scientist and now an engineer.)
Questions about scientific papers are not prima facies off-topic. Scientific papers are generally not primarily written to have literary value, but to convey an idea. Hidden meanings are mostly antithetic to this. However, it is possible for a scientific paper to have literary value, and questions about this are on-topic here.
This, however, does not settle the issue of your question. The main problem with your question is that you're begging a conclusion. You're clearly seeking to find a particular interpretation of a paper which wildly differs from what the paper means. (Yes, yes, I know, you're going to refute that one can objectively assign meaning to a text. But unless you're following a thoroughly solipsist philosophy, in which case what the particular figment of your mind that I am has to tell you may not matter, you do assume that a text has objective meaning by the very act of reading this answer.)
Your original title was particularly problematic — “Why is the Turing Test really a test about gender?” is just as bad as “Why didn't Turing stop beating his wife”. A more reasonable title would be “Is the Turing Test really a test about gender?”. But that does not invalidate the question — it's still possible to answer, by saying “no, it isn't”. I had to think about it for a while, but I do conclude that the question is not off-topic, and it is answerable, so it should remain open.
I do admit that I have a secondary motive in leaving the question open. You clearly have an answer in mind and I'm curious to see what it is. I fear that it's some kind of imposture, but I'm still willing to assume good faith.
Although it's been overlooked in the answers so far (in part because the question got on the HNQ), there are a number of literary angles that the question could be approached from.
When you say "Turing's paper may be related to various tropes about AI and gender", are you talking about the trope of AIs being portrayed as female that we see in films like Metropolis or Ex Machina? Because that could indeed be an interesting approach; one (who had more knowledge of the topic than me) could draw a parallel between the mixture of human and "other" inherent to an AI and the way women in some male-authored fiction have been portrayed as a mixture of human and "other". – Torisuda
@Torisuda THANK YOU for engaging with the question. To be honest, I need to do more research myself. But yes, that definitely is one possible approach. If you want more directions to go in, think about how AI has been used to talk about reproduction without sex, or think about how the Turing test, if passed, means that the categories of human and AI have no meaning, because humans can't tell one from the other. There are a lot of interesting angles to approach this question from; here's hoping we get a good answer. – Hamlet♦
If I asked this question on a computer science site, these angles would be ignored and derided as "over-analyzing" (as shown from the comments and answers this question has received so far, in part due to the HNQ). That's why I'm asking this question here, on the Literature site.
Our site's scope is very broad. Let's embrace that and push the boundaries of what people think is literature.
