WORK
The Machine That Is Man
Skinner's 1969 Psychology Today article — published alongside the relevant passage in Contingencies of Reinforcement — in which he argued that the real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
"The Machine That Is Man" appeared in Psychology Today in 1969, concurrent with the publication of Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis. The article was characteristically Skinnerian: a provocation disguised as a clarification, using the emerging public interest in artificial intelligence to press his long-standing claim that the concept of "thinking" is explanatorily bankrupt when applied to human beings. The article's most-quoted sentence — "The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do" — was not a claim about machines. It was a claim about the explanatory emptiness of mentalistic vocabulary as applied to either organism. If thinking is merely a word we attach to certain behavioral outcomes produced by certain environmental contingencies, then the mystery of the thinking machine is no mystery at all. It is the same mystery, relocated. The Skinner volume uses this article as its epigraph and its point of departure.
