Those who in the 1930s and 1940s wished to draw connections between social structures and scientific knowledge tended to be those determined to graft social systems onto science, or to derive them from science.

Most notably the Nazi and Soviet ideologues were doing this, but Polanyi too, in opposing the influence of the mechanical marxism of the 1930s, was nudging science into a sophisticated revival of Christianity. He too was trying to push science around, wanting it to come up with answers that would fit in with a pre-existing religious and political philosophy.

Such a thing was quite foreign to Alan Turing, who believed that he was keeping himself securely within the realm of experimental truth.

One person did, in contrast, investigate the capacity of language to separate the factual from the non-factual. But Wittgenstein's methods were such that hardly anyone could ever be sure what he meant.

Alan Turing's approach was one that rode roughshod over Wittgenstein's questions in a search for the simple truth at the centre—but it had the virtue that the picture he drew was clear and plain, something that could in principle be tried out.

As for the integration of a theory of logical problems, a psychological theory which had led him to 'the root of the problem' in his own unhappiness, Tolstoy's historical problem about the nature of individual action, Forster's questions about individuals and class consciousness—all this would be too much for anyone to encompass, and it was certainly not the way in which he worked or thought.

At Bletchley he had worked on the central logical problems, finding bold and simple solutions, while a vast human organisation sprouted around him; it had not been his role to pull the whole complexity together.