Akl-ı selim
Turkish for sound judgment or common sense. Cahit Arf used it to argue that expertise should help us exercise our own understanding rather than become a conclusion we repeat because an authority said it.
Akl-ı selim is an Ottoman-Turkish expression for sound judgment, the plain common sense of a clear mind. In his 1959 lecture on whether machines can think, the mathematician Cahit Arf opens not with computers but with this idea.
His argument is that expertise should help us exercise our own understanding. It should not turn into a conclusion we repeat because an authority said it. When something looks complicated, his method is to break the unfamiliar into familiar steps until understanding is possible. Understanding comes before machinery.
Why it still matters
The idea reads as a counterweight to both AI hype and AI dismissal. Before asking whether a system is intelligent, ask what it actually does under specific conditions, with specific authority and consequences. That is the shift in the essay on the wrong questions about AI: from what AI is in the abstract to what a particular AI system does.
It also sits next to Arf's emphasis on intibak kabiliyeti, the ability to adapt: judgment and adaptation, not stored answers, are what make thinking.
Read more in Cahit Arf's 1959 question about thinking machines.