Alan Turing — "The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to whi…"
The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction.
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More from Alan Turing
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."
"The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that it is a very complex machine."
"I have had a very happy life. I have done many things that I wanted to do."
"The question of whether machines can think is a philosophical one, not a scientific one."
"If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be?"
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Human behavior and social customs resist scientific analysis because they are too variable, context-dependent, and shaped by individual will. Unlike physical phenomena that follow consistent laws, what people do and how societies operate cannot be reliably predicted or systematized through empirical observation and pattern-matching alone. Human affairs defy the neat generalizations that science depends on.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing built machines that processed logic with absolute precision, yet this observation reveals his awareness of science's limits. As someone who cracked Enigma by exploiting systematic patterns in German military communications, he understood deeply when patterns existed and when they didn't. His own persecution for homosexuality—an irrational social custom—personally demonstrated how human behavior defies rational induction.
The era
Written in the early 1950s, amid post-war optimism about applying scientific rationalism to human problems—behaviorism, cybernetics, social engineering. Governments believed computation and systems thinking could optimize society. Turing, working at the dawn of computing, pushed back against naive scientism, recognizing that the messy, culturally embedded nature of human customs resists the clean formalism his machines demanded.
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