# Beyond Behavior: Why AI Evaluation Needs a Cognitive Revolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05631/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13702/) (2023)
- [AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15366/) (2021)
- [Adversarial GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Robustness Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02840/) (2021)
- [What Will it Take to Fix Benchmarking in Natural Language Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02145/) (2021)
- [The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13966/) (2022)
- [Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02061/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed replacing the question "Can machines think?" with a behavioral test: if a machine's outputs are indistinguishable from those of a thinking being, the question of whether it truly thinks can be set aside. This paper argues that Turing's move was not only a pragmatic simplification but also an epistemological commitment, a decision about what kind of evidence counts as relevant to intelligence attribution, and that this commitment has quietly constrained AI research for seven decades. We trace how Turing's behavioral epistemology became embedded in the field's evaluative infrastructure, rendering unaskable a class of questions about process, mechanism, and internal organization that cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines learned to ask. We draw a structural parallel to the behaviorist-to-cognitivist transition in psychology: just as psychology's commitment to studying only observable behavior prevented it from asking productive questions about internal mental processes until that commitment was abandoned, AI's commitment to behavioral evaluation prevents it from distinguishing between systems that achieve identical outputs through fundamentally different computational processes, a distinction on which intelligence attribution depends. We argue that the field requires an epistemological transition comparable to the cognitive revolution: not an abandonment of behavioral evidence, but a recognition that behavioral evidence alone is insufficient for the construct claims the field wishes to make. We articulate what a post-behaviorist epistemology for AI would involve and identify the specific questions it would make askable that the field currently has no way to ask.