ABSTRACT
The wrong approach. I suppose that the most superficial and unconvincing excuse for agreeing to discuss the behaviour of any artificial mechanism before a gathering of psychologists might run somewhat as follows: Experimental psychology has lately come to concern itself more and more with the human being as a ‘black box’, having certain characteristic ways of receiving and reacting to information. Perhaps not altogether accidentally, the merchant of automata has discovered that in his stock list there are several artificially contrived black boxes which in principle can be made to receive and react to information in the same characteristic ways. So, he might argue, his artificial black boxes are surely quite as proper subjects of the psychologist’s attention as the human ones.
