CONCEPT
Reckoning as Reason
Hobbes’s 1651 claim that reasoning is nothing but reckoning—addition and subtraction performed on the names of things—the first formal statement of a
computational theory of mind, and the founding wager that the entire project of artificial intelligence has been testing ever since.
In
Leviathan,
Thomas Hobbes wrote that “when a man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from addition of parcels”—and concluded flatly that “reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning.” This was, in 1651, a radical reduction: it drained the supernatural out of the intellect, insisted that cognition is a physical event in a physical brain, and proposed that the mind is a calculating engine operating on the names we attach to things. Three centuries before anyone built a digital computer, Hobbes had stated the metaphysical commitment that makes building one look like a promising way to make intelligence. The
resonance with
artificial intelligence is not a loose analogy; it is a near-literal anticipation. The entire research program of AI rests on the premise that intelligence is symbol manipulation—that a physical system shuffling representations according to formal rules can exhibit reasoning—and Hobbes stated that premise. But Hobbes