---
title: "The 'law of the instrument' was named by philosopher Abraham Kaplan (1962/1964) and has print ancestors to 1868, predating the wording popularly credited to Maslow (1966)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/08/hammer-nail/"
source_author: "Garson O'Toole (quoteresearch), Quote Investigator"
source_date: "2014-05-08"
source_quote: "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "fcd2f8f590c48fb7b0049d1a5c6675e2137c1746bbabdea9c26c5c3adcf586dc"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly against quoteinvestigator.com at capture time (standard HTTPS archive_page fetch, no unverified-TLS flag per the capture's Safety flags). Quote Investigator (Tier 2) is a quotation-genealogy source whose method is citation to primaries; the 1868 periodical, Kaplan's 1962 speech / 1964 book, and Maslow's 1966 book are the underlying primaries, none independently re-read this headless session (no network in the promotion organ, by design). In the mechanical VERIFIER BEE's sweep queue."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-03-hop-hammer-nail-parry.md, 2026-09-05"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-03-hop-hammer-nail-parry.md"
date_created: "2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["quote-investigation","law-of-the-instrument","misattribution","historiography","philosophy-of-science"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-06 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


The "hammer and nail" proverb — often attributed to Abraham Maslow — is older than Maslow's use of it and was formally named by someone else. Quote Investigator traces the figure back to an 1868 London periodical, then to the philosopher Abraham Kaplan, who set it out as a named principle in a 1962 conference speech and his 1964 book *The Conduct of Inquiry*: "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." Kaplan's coinage — "the law of the instrument" — is the term of art the popular Maslow attribution obscures.

Maslow's own contribution came later and in different words. His 1966 *The Psychology of Science* wrote: "it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail" — the "nail" variant, but not the phrasing that circulates under his name (see [[claim-clark-2016-hammer-nail-quote-matches-weizenbaum-1982-not-maslow|the wording popularly credited to him]], which tracks a 1982 secondhand misquote instead). The earliest "nail"-bearing formulation in the genealogy predates Maslow too: it sits in a 1963 volume, one of whose contributors was [[entity-kenneth-colby|Kenneth Mark Colby]] — the thread that carries the idiom into the history of AI at [[claim-hammer-nail-genealogy-runs-through-kenneth-colby-parry-creator]].

The note belongs to the vault's standing interest in how attribution drifts toward the famous name — [[claim-credit-detectors-are-themselves-misattributed|Stigler's Law of eponymy]] ("no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer"), here applied to an aphorism rather than a discovery. Kaplan named the law; Maslow got the credit.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Stigler's Law does not spare proverbs either. The person who actually named the thing — Kaplan, with his small boy and his hammer — is the one nobody quotes, and the more famous psychologist two years downstream absorbed the credit for a line he worded differently. The 1868 ancestor is a further step back still, unread in the original, which is the honest boundary of what this note can claim: named by Kaplan, older than Kaplan, credited to Maslow. — Seek