Commemorating the Centennial of Herbert Simon’s birth

Herbert Simon

As many Simon aficionado’s will know, this year sees several conferences and publications marking the centenary of his birth. So on this note, yet another plug for Minds, Models and Milieux Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon but also to mention some upcoming Herbert Simon Society events (it’s somewhat reassuring given the disrepair of the delusional EU that so much interest in HS (and Hayek) emanates from Italy):

HERBERT SIMON: THE GENIUS OF SIMPLICITY AND BOUNDEDNESS
Turin, 14th October 2016
Download Tentative Programme
International Workshop

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS NUDGES AND HEURISTICS FOR PUBLIC POLICIES
Turin, 15th October 2016
Download Call for Paper

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Reverend Charlie Jackson

gospel, gospel music

. . . the inseparable connection between the sinning music of Saturday night and the sanctified music of Sunday morning . . .

Perfectly expressed by Thom Jurek discussing my latest acquisition recommended to me by someone at the  wonderful Louisiana Music Factory.

This man’s holy blues sounds more punk than Hillsong, but no matter your beliefs, hearing his music is a religious experience.

Nice article here by Dan Condon.

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Hang in there Rick

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All the best to Rick. It has always amazed me that Quo never really broke the US: their brand of basic intense and melodic boogie I’d have thought would have had wide and loyal support as in Europe. My three favorite albums Quo, On the Level and Live. I guess the essence of Quo is Down Down.

Before that, the band managed to reach number 12 in the U.S. with the psychedelic classic “Pictures of Matchstick Men” (a Top Ten hit in the U.K.). Following that single, the band suffered a lean period for the next few years, before the bandmembers decided to refashion themselves as a hard rock boogie band in 1970 with their Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon album. The Quo have basically recycled the same simple boogie on each successive album and single, yet their popularity has never waned in Britain. If anything, their very predictability has ensured the group a large following.

— AllMusic

Rick-Parfitt

Herbert Simon – a Hedgehog and a Fox

Herbert Simon

The seventeenth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Roger Frantz and Leslie Marsh

A Quality of Mind

If as Archilochus’ famous fragment goes “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” then Herbert Simon is, at face value, a star example of a fox. Popularized by Isaiah Berlin (1978), the fox-hedgehog distinction has been interpreted (overly simplistically as Berlin acknowledged) as mutually exclusive or ideal types. Hedgehog-type intelligences are motivated by an overarching grand idea or scheme that they then apply to- or through which filter- all else. By contrast, fox-type intelligences are highly adaptive and come up new ideas more suited to a specific situation or context. We are of the view that the supposed hedgehog-fox dichotomy is way too trite and onedimensional an assessment of Simon. Without any fear of paradox Herbert Simon, we contend, was both a hedgehog and a fox.

Ascriptions of “polymath” and “Renaissance man” to Simon are legion and, while not without merit, they gloss over the distinctive quality of such a mind. The late Carl Djerassi was concerned that these days polymaths are viewed synonymously with “dabblers,” the implication being one of dilettantism (Barth, 2011, p. 96). In an age of hyper-specialization, a tacit resentment in some academic circles can be detected, a resentment that has substantive form (ideological and/or methodological) or plain old professional sour grapes infused by misguided protectionist intent.

Hayek, whose mind perhaps comes closest to Simon’s in both substance and style and whom Simon held in the highest regard understood that: . . . exclusive concentration on a speciality has a peculiarly baneful effect: it will not merely prevent us from being attractive company or good citizens but may impair our competence in our proper field . . . (Hayek, 1967, pp. 123; 127) This was echoed by G. L. S. Shackle who suggested that:

To be a complete economist, a man need only be a mathematician, a philosopher, a psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian, a geographer, and a student of politics; a master of prose exposition; a man of the world with the experience of practical business and finance, an understanding of the problems of administration, and a good knowledge of four or five languages. All this in addition, of course, to familiarity with the economics literature itself (Shackle, 2010, p. 241).

Simon embodied these virtues in spades. Curiously much criticism that followed his award of the Nobel Prize in 1978 was because he wasn’t an “economist”! There can be no doubt that Simon’s polymathic motivations were driven by genuine curiosity, a curiosity inextricably linked to intellectual honesty not withstanding of course endowed with natural ability and life opportunities. As we well know, Simon made significant contributions to political science, epistemology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, public administration, organization theory and complexity studies, diverse disciplines that were not conventionally discontinuous for Simon but merely different lenses through which Simon approached his central lifelong concern – the theorizing of human behavior, or rationality, or decision-making in complex social environments. The hedgehog-fox distinction dissolves for as Herb Simon’s daughter Kathie, citing Edward Feigenbaum, has already indicated in the Foreword to this collection:

… in awe of his enormous knowledge and the range of his contributions, I once asked him to explain his mastery of so many fields. His unforgettable answer was, ‘I am a monomaniac. What I am a monomaniac about is decision-making.’

This is borne out by Simon again:

. . . the “Renaissance Mind is not broader than other intelligent minds but happens to cover a narrow swathe across the multi-dimensional space of knowledge that happens to cut across many disciplines which have divided up the space in other ways. My own narrow swathe happens to be the process of human problem solving and decision making, and almost everything I have done lies in that quite narrow band (cited in Subrata, 2003, p. 686).

We are in full accord with Subrata’s contention that a multidisciplinary creative mind such as Simon’s is neither a “flitterer” nor merely a modal patchwork of ideas but an emergent distinctive “cognitive style” the likes of which is mitigated in the prevailing culture of hyper-specialization. A good teacher should insist that his or her students should not merely seek to have their intellectual prejudices validated but that they should approach a given thinker for their quality of mind – and Simon would be a perfect instantiation.

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Free Will Revisited: Dennett and Harris in Conversation

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Check out this excellent discussion between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris. Both shine since I think they have raised each other’s game; this despite being recorded after an already long day. As Sam rightly says, since so much gets lost and/or miscognized in writing it is thus vital to listen to the first 8 or so minutes where Sam gives us the backstory. Bravo to both for having the courage to try again and especially to Sam for having the intellectual and moral gumption to do what he does sans the virtue-signaling that typically motivates so many wanna-be public intellectuals. I suspect that the unlikely location for the recording (a pub) and the fact of only having one mic, has made for Sam’s best podcast yet. The upshot: the listener literally eavesdropping on a real conversation rather than the leadenness that tends to infuse recordings made in studios or from Skyping. Crikey, has it really been 25 years since Consciousness Explained? This podcast offers so much food for thought, much more than you ever will from a pat classroom talk or a lecture.

Worth noting is Dennett’s distillation of Rapoport’s rules:

  • You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
  • You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
  • You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
  • Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 91

walker percy

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Like many rich women, she loved a bargain.

*****

Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don’t have to and I won’t.

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Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?

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Strange that he, my father, often spoke of the Ardennes and the Rhine and Weimar but never mentioned Buchenwald, which was only four miles from Weimar and which Patton took three weeks later, never mentioned that the horrified Patton paraded fifteen hundred of Weimar’s best humanistic Germans right down the middle of Buchenwald to see the sights, Patton of all people, no Goethe he who said to the fifteen hundred not look you sons of Goethe but look you sons of bitches (is not this in fact, Father, where your humanism ends in the end?).

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You loved only death because for you what passed for life was really a death-in-life, which has no name and so is worse than death.

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Identity, Individuation and Substance

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After a long break from writing on metaphysics the wonderful David Wiggins has a freely available paper published in the European Journal of Philosophy. Sameness and Substance remains one of the most satisfying  (and most difficult) reads I’ve ever experienced.

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Forty four years ago I published a short monograph called Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, henceforth ISTC (Wiggins 1967). Once I saw it in print, I started putting one or two things right. From this process arose Sameness and Substance, henceforth S&S, (Wiggins 1980) and later Sameness and Substance Renewed, henceforth S&SR (Wiggins 2001). Ten years further on, noting the virtual disappearance of the sortalist view of identity from present day discussions, I wonder sometimes whether the third of these efforts was found to be unreadable. What I know for certain is that, over the passage of time, the philosophical scene has changed. It is no longer wise to assume, as I was apt to do, that everyone with a serious interest in the metaphysics of identity will know Aristotle’s distinction between what a thing is (i.e. what fundamental kind of thing it is) and what the thing is like, or be eager to read such texts as Categories, Chapters 1–5. Nor can the other Aristotelian resonances by which I once set such store be relied upon any longer to enlighten or remind. If they have any effect, it is rather to discredit the claim to have arrived at a perfectly general account—an account not at odds with anything that modern science reveals to us—of the identity and individuation of objects which are extended in space and persist through time.

The Radical Individualism of David Bowie

david bowie

And my brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones
We never got it off on that revolution stuff
What a drag, too many snags
Now I’ve drunk a lot of wine and I’m feeling fine
Got to race some cat to bed
Oh is that concrete all around
Or is it in my head?

— All the Young Dudes

Though Lurie is on the right track I’m not at all convinced as this piece stands. Yes, Bowie is the most naturally philosophical and literate of song-writers (i.e. not of the sloganeering Lennonesque variety) but the philosophical explication on offer here seems very slight to me. It’s trying way too hard to find stuff to support the individualism thesis (which as I’ve indicated is there in Bowie). No conceptual distinction is drawn between individualism and individuality as well as the notion that the individual vs. collective is not as stark a contrast as inferred — the individual and the group are in some sense ontologically on a par and of course the relationship is complex and in tension. When Lurie writes: “To assist with this endeavor I have enlisted a number of fellow writers and artists across the ideological spectrum to weigh in on the hidden meanings of these gems” (emphasis added) — I get worried. Maybe Lurie’s book We Can Be Heroes: The Radical Individualism of David Bowie does delve into these issues and maybe he does present a compelling case for Bowie’s so-called “social-libertarian proclivities”. What’s the approach? Unearthing “hidden meanings” via a Freudo-Marxist, hermeneutic, semiotic analyses . . . or just by wishful thinking? In any event I’d caution that if art is to maintain its authenticity, it should not be subject to propositional incursions. Second, as an experience of delight it does not involve the bifurcation of first the experience and contemplation thereof, followed by a rendering (expressed, conveyed, mimicked, copied, reproduced, exhibited): there is no undifferentiated poetic imagination, never mere entertainment nor merely the conveyor of wisdom.

For those who want to nerd out on Bowie, I suggest a two-fold approach: Simon Critchley’s book (the philosophical) and Tony Visconti’s autobiography (the practical).

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Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2016

complexity

Available for free download here. The special theme of the conference: How can the synthetic study of living systems contribute to societies: scientifically, technically, and culturally? The goal of the conference theme is to better understand societies with the purpose of using this understanding for a more efficient management and development of social systems.

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