It's the thought that counts

Turing proposed his test in a spirit of down-to-earth pragmatism. He saw that, when faced with the question, "Is it possible to build a machine that can think?", Turing hoped that his test would cut through a lot of fruitless semantic debate. It was an engineer's solution, rather than a philosopher's. Perhaps inevitably, Turing's proposal merely redirected the philosophical debate. Instead of quarrelling about the meaning of the verb "to think", philosophers argued about the meaning of the Turing test instead.