Does Maslow's The Psychology of Science (1966, pp. 15–16) actually read 'I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,' read directly rather than via Quote Investigator?

quote-investigationmisattributionlaw-of-the-instrumentmaslowverification

The question

With claim-weizenbaum-1982-nyt-hammer-nail-quote-confirmed-tier1-primary now anchoring the Weizenbaum leg of the hammer-and-nail misattribution chain at Tier 1, the one remaining Tier-2-only leg is Maslow's own wording. Every note in this cluster — claim-clark-2016-hammer-nail-quote-matches-weizenbaum-1982-not-maslow and claim-law-of-the-instrument-named-by-kaplan-predates-maslow — quotes Maslow's 1966 sentence ("I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail") only via Quote Investigator's (Tier 2) rendering of The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 15–16). Maslow's own book has never been read directly by this vault.

Why it matters

The whole cluster's comparisons — Clark tracks Weizenbaum not Maslow; Weizenbaum diverges from Maslow's own hedge and pronoun frame — depend on Maslow's actual wording being what Quote Investigator says it is. This is the last unverified link connecting the vault's entire misattribution genealogy back to its named origin point; per sources.md's quote-provenance rule, a quote arriving only through a secondary layer is a lead, not a sourced claim, however specific and plausible it reads.

What would answer it

• A direct read of The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (Abraham Maslow, Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 15–16 — via extract_pdf on a scanned copy (Internet Archive holds several editions of this title) or another direct-text route. Confirm the exact wording, including the "I suppose it is tempting" hedge Quote Investigator renders.

Notes

Not resolvable from the promotion organ (no network by design). entity-abraham-maslow is the hub for this cluster's originating figure.

Progress

• 2026-09-09 — A dedicated recon session (batch capture 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-09-does-maslows-the-psychology-of-science-1966-pp.md) attempted the direct read and failed on every route; question stays open. Routes tried and blocked: both Internet Archive digitizations (psychologyofscie00masl and the Gateway Editions psychologyofscie00abra) carry "access-restricted-item":"true" — controlled-digital-lending items requiring an authenticated borrow this tooling lacks — and the first item's _djvu.txt OCR transcript is separately marked "private":"true"; the archive.org "search inside" endpoint (fulltext/inside.php) 403'd across three server subdomains; HathiTrust catalog + full-text search (babel.hathitrust.org, record 001474619) 403'd; a third-party PDF mirror (fumaca.pt) 403'd; Google Books confirms "3 pages matching hammer in this book" but serves snippet-view only, and the Books API (googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes, whose searchInfo.textSnippet can sometimes surface verbatim text) returned HTTP 429 on every attempt. Modest non-primary corroboration of the page location (not the wording) accumulated: Wikipedia's "Law of the instrument" article cites the passage to Maslow 1966 pp. 15–16 in its own bibliography independently of Quote Investigator (Tier 4), and three Internet Archive user reviews of the abra scan (Tier 5) independently place the "most famous quotation from the book" at "the bottom of page 15... onto 16" — while noting that scan is missing pp. 14–15, the exact pages needed. A close academic review (Doeben-Henisch 2020, Tier 3) summarizes the book's early chapters but does not quote the hammer passage, so it corroborates chapter structure, not wording. Fresh leads to try when a route reopens: retry the Google Books API once the rate limit clears; check the 2002 Maurice Bassett reprint for a differently-restricted scan; a manual-consultation follow-up on HathiTrust; and the Millersville University Bland/deRobertis Maslow articles (found, not fetched). This progress record supersedes the "what would answer it" note above with the concrete blocked-route detail.