Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

Since I missed marking the birth of Simon on the 15th, here’s a belated posting of an obituary by his student Edward A. Feigenbaum. (I’m pleased to report that my co-edited project with Roger Frantz commemorating the centenary of HS’s birth is coming together very nicely. HS’s daughter has been incredibly responsive towards the project).

Herbert A . Simon, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics, died on 9 February at the age of 84. He was Richard King Mellon Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. In an era when universities assiduously preserve the names of their new buildings for generous donors, the new Computer Science Building at Carnegie Mellon University is instead named for Simon and another renowned computer scientist, Allen Newell.

The hallmark of Simon’s remarkable career is the extent of his cross-disciplinary contributions: from economic theory to psychology to behavioral science to computer science. Before his Nobel Prize, Simon had already won the A. M. Turing Award, the top accolade for computer science, prompting computer scientists to refer to him as “our Nobel Prize winner.” But psychologists also awarded him their top honor, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, and they too claimed him as their own.

As his graduate student, 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 unforget-table answer was, “I am a monomaniac. What I am a monomaniac about is decision-making.” Studies and models of decision-making are the themes that unify most of Simon’s contributions.

He challenged the assumptions of mid- 20th century economic theory, the so-called Rational Economic Man model. This model assumed the omniscience of human decision-making: that humans recognize all of their possible choices and the consequences of selecting each. Simon, the empiricist, observed that Rational Economic Man does not exist. The cognitive ability of people to recognize alternatives and calculate optima is in fact quite limited. He argued that economics could not be built upon a foundation of assumptions concerning human behavior that were patently false.

As a substitute, he introduced assumptions of bounded rationality and the concept of “Satisficing” Man, who cannot maximize – or minimize because the computational demands of doing so are beyond his capability. Satisficing man makes choices that are satisfactory-good enough, rather than the best. In the early 1950s, Simon introduced his theory with two classic papers in which he argued that objects (real or symbolic) in the environment of the decision-maker influence choice as much as the intrinsic information-processing capabilities of the decision-maker. In his book The Sciences of theArtificial (1), with his usual expository skill, he made this idea easy to grasp. His metaphor was the ant on the beach: The ant makes her way from a starting point to a food source along an intricate path. But the path appears to be complex only because of the patterns of the intervening grains of sand, not because of any complex information-processing by the ant.

Collaborating with James March, Simon applied the search model of problem-solving to the study of how organizations make decisions and how they innovate. Their book, Organizations (2), is the foundation of modern organization theory. March, Richard Cyert, and others extended Simon’s theory to microeconomic phenomena in the influential book, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (3).

Simon, the theorist, sought to give these abstractions a concrete expression from which precise predictions of human problem-solving behavior could be made. Simon tried using mathematics but found its lan-guage was not rich enough to express the complexity of the problem-solving processes he was attempting to model. With Allen Newell in 1955, he discovered the right economics language: the language of the digital computer. Newell, Simon, and J. C. Shaw of RAND invented a powerful programming language for describing complex symbol processing. They used their new language to model problem-solving processes such as proving theorems in logic. This marked the start of the field of artificial intelligence and Si-mon considered this contribution to be his finest. Many computer simulation programs of human cognition followed. Newell and Simon’s 1972 book, Human Problem Solving (4), is perhaps .- the most important book on the scientific study of human thinking in the 20th century.

For the last 25 years of his life, Simon continued to experiment and build computer models of cognition. He designed models of human expertise, scientific discov-ery (he modeled how certain historically great discoveries of science were actually made), and human memory. He worked for decades on models of the processes through which symbols are learned, recognized, retrieved, and forgotten.

If one were to read a single book that would encompass the essential Simon, I would suggest the slim volume The Sciences of the Artificial (1), written for a broad scientific audience. In an elegant and lucid way, Simon explains the principles of modeling complex systems, particularly the human in formation-processing system that we call the mind. There is no better epilogue for Herbert Simon than that imparted by one of his Carnegie Mellon University colleagues: As Herb Simon struggled to recover from complications of surgery a few days before his death, this author of nearly a thousand papers and 27 books finished a manuscript he was writing and gave instructions to his daughter about its publication.

References

1. H.A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial  [The Karl Taylor Compton Lectures] (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,1969).

2. J. G. March, H. A. Simon, Organizations (Wiley, New York, 1958).

3. R.M. Cyert, J. G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963).

4. A. Newell, H. A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N J, 1972).

From: SCIENCE VOL 291 16 MARCH 2001

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust

bourbon

My chum Lenore Ealy I know to be a fan of Bourbon. She very kindly left me some Eagle Rare Single Barrel to polish off. I thought it very smooth but a bit on the sweet side for me – a damn good effort though. She told me of a piece she’d recently written on bourbon so here it is. It’s unlikely you will come across a more insightful and poetic piece on booze.

. . . to see in that sip of well-crafted and adequately proofed bourbon a non-instrumental world of valued connections to my Southern heritage, to the virtues and the sins of my fathers, to the good earth from which the corn sprouts, to the flowing branch of crisp water, and to the ingenuity of man in discovering the arts of distillation.

It’s rather as Walker Percy put it: Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

Review of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics

oakeshott

Efraim’s review of Elizabeth’s book.

Michael Oakeshott was once known mainly as a thinker about politics. That this should have been so was in a certain sense unavoidable. Oakeshott held the chair of Political Science at the London School of Economics, taught the history of political thought, and published a few controversial essays on the subject of political life. Moreover, the Zeitgeist, or at least the mood, of the “progressive” reading public at the time was to regard political awareness as a leading virtue. This reading public was also used to a particular kind of deliberating about politics. From political thinkers it expected a doctrine—a set of specific recommendations about how to solve political problems. Instead, in Oakeshott the readers found a writer ostensibly cautious in the measure of significance he bestowed on political awareness and wary of suggesting practical recommendations. That this man was actually a professor of politics puzzled his reviewers. “I fail myself to see,” wrote one, “how a man can happily develop a subject unless he loves it—and certainly he cannot if he regards it with impassioned hate” (Corey 2006, 158).

Although the remnants of such an attitude are still apparent when one steps out of the cosy circle of Oakeshott connoisseurs, it is quite clear nowadays that Oakeshott’s political thought cannot be taken separately from other aspects of his philosophy that constitute a certain general worldview. But what is the essence of this worldview? To understand Oakeshott’s mind is not an easy task, and numerous disagreements exist even among his most careful readers.

Elizabeth Corey, in a lucidly written book, suggests an answer of her own to this question. In her opinion, in order to understand Oakeshott’s worldview one should pay special attention to two subjects, religion and aesthetics, and also analyze the connection between these two realms and the idea of practical life in general and politics in particular.

The presence of the religious and aestheticist sentiment in Oakeshott’s thought is an established fact, but putting them at the heart of his philosophy is an enterprise full of obstacles. Of all the issues with which Oakeshott was preoccupied, these two are perhaps the most difficult to decipher. In his youth, Oakeshott was a believer who wrote quite a lot about religion. But in his more mature writings, the theme of religion fades away. It is still a matter of controversy among commentators whether this shift signifies the abandonment of belief or the most intimate connection to it. The subject of aesthetics seems to be less idiosyncratic. Oakeshott did try to articulate a coherent philosophy of aesthetics in his mature writings. Yet this subject is not without its own difficulties. A popular opinion in the scholarly literature is that Oakeshott’s view of aesthetics is the least coherent part of his philosophy. This view persists despite the fact that one of Oakeshott’s most important essays, perhaps the one from which everyone should begin his or her acquaintance with his thought — “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1962)—is dedicated specifically to the subject of aesthetics. Therefore, anyone who tries to describe Oakeshott’s philosophy of aesthetics as an indispensable element of his thought must address the prejudice that his views of aesthetic experience are incoherent.

These then are the obstacles facing any scholar who emphasizes the significance of religion and poetry in Oakeshott. In my opinion, Corey performs brilliantly in overcoming them whether or not one agrees with every aspect of her interpretation. She offers a persuasive, accessible, and still nuanced account of what she considers to be the essence of Oakeshott’s outlook, despite relatively limited resources at her disposal; after all, the bulk of Oakeshott’s writings is not about religion and aesthetics. She provides a sympathetic but also critical conversation with Oakeshott’s ideas, ultimately offering us a coherent picture of the place of the religious, poetical, and political in the totality of his thought. In addition, she packs the pages with interesting insights about many particular moments of Oakeshott’s philosophy and includes a comparison of his vision with that of Eric Voegelin. In this review, however, I limit myself to what I see as the book’s central argument.

In order to understand Oakeshott’s worldview one should take seriously his early intellectual development, which is marked by deep religious reflections influenced by Augustinian writings and by the Augustinian element in modernist Protestant theology. From there Oakeshott absorbed the view that presupposed the dichotomy between the world and religion. True religion, according to him, is supposed to reject the world. Yet, whereas in Augustine this worldlessness appears as the anticipation of the world to come, in Oakeshott it is presented in a secularized form with certain mystical overtones. The world that Oakeshott wants to reject is the world of practical desire, the world of concern with past and future. The alternative to this world is not some future afterlife but the insight of the present.

One could even suggest that the major ideas of the mature Oakeshott — his emphasis on purposelessness and on valuing things in themselves, his rejection of the tyranny of practice and appetite, his affirmation of the present enjoyment—may have originated in this quasi-religious insight. Yet Oakeshott’s treatment of religion is ambiguous already in his early writings. Religion is often described by him not as the liberation from prudential preoccupations of practical life but as the completion or even the highest expression of practice. Therefore, although the young Oakeshott does consider the option of escaping worldliness through a kind of religious insight, he does not fully articulate this religious alternative to the world of practice.

In order to find such an alternative, one should look instead at what Oakeshott has to say about poetry, or aesthetics. It is here that he explicitly develops the idea of the present experience untouched by the considerations of appetite. According to him, the world of poetry is an autonomous world of imagining with its own presuppositions, and it is undisturbed by practical considerations. The main characteristic of this experience is that this is the experience of contemplation and delight, which of course can exist only as immediate and present experience.

This is the point where the puzzlement usually enters. Oakeshott sometimes suggested that practical life, at least if it is to be lived fully and authentically, should possess a poetical character. But is this suggestion not contradictory? If he sees poetry as an independent world of experience, how can he recommend an intimate connection between practice and poetry? And if he does recommend it, does he not commit what he himself regards as the worst philosophical error, that of irrelevance?

Corey rejects this criticism. Oakeshott, she maintains, did not confuse between modes; once he formulated the idea of the mode of poetry it remained for him an autonomous mode. Oakeshott should not be understood as saying that a properly led practical life would become the aesthetic life. Rather, it would become like poetry. In its essence, practical life will always remain practical, with all its deficiencies. Yet it still is possible to point to some aspects of practical life that emphasize present insight rather than future satisfaction. Such are the experiences of love and friendship. And to understand what this means—to live by putting an emphasis on the enjoyment of the present—we should look at the mode of aesthetic imagining as a model, although the emphasis on the present will never become the essence of practical life. Only poetry makes the present insight into its own essence.

Having thus described the origin of the notion of presentness in religion, and having followed the transformation of this notion into the essential characteristic of poetry, Corey proceeds to discuss how this insight helps to save practice somewhat from the tyranny of the appetite by mitigating negative features of the practical pursuit of the satisfaction of wants. It does so by intimating the possibility of the alternative conduct of life— one that values the present enjoyment, integrity, and adventure more than results. These two alternatives appear under various guises in Oakeshott’s writings: as the morality of habit and the morality of reflection, as play and work, as the politics of skepticism and the politics of faith, or as the civil and the enterprise associations. These pairs represent of course two ideal types, two extremes. In the ever-ambiguous reality, these extremes are always mixed, though to varying degrees. One can never live absolutely in the present, completely ignoring the need to satisfy wants. It is important, however, to take care that this “poetic” element of life is given greater weight so that our life can be protected from being consumed exclusively by the demands of practice.

Frege’s puzzle and Frege cases: Defending a quasi-syntactic solution

cognition, cognitive science

Here is the intro to Rob’s article:

There is no doubt that social interaction plays an important role in language-learning, as well as in concept acquisition. In surprising contrast, social interaction makes only passing appearance in our most promising naturalistic theories of content. This is particularly true in the case of mental content (e.g., Cummins, 1996, Dretske, 1981, Dretske, 1988, Fodor, 1987, Fodor, 1990a and Millikan, 1984); and insofar as linguistic content derives from mental content (Grice, 1957), social interaction seems missing from our best naturalistic theories of both. In this paper, I explore the ways in which even the most individualistic of theories of mental content can, and should, accommodate social effects. I focus especially on the way in which inferential relations, including those that are socially taught, influence language-learning and concept acquisition. I argue that these factors affect the way subjects conceive of mental and linguistic content. Such effects have a dark side: the social and inferential processes in question give rise to misleading intuitions about content itself. They create the illusion that content and inferential relations are more deeply intertwined than they actually are. This illusion confounds an otherwise attractive solution to what is known as ‘Frege’s puzzle’ (Salmon, 1986). I conclude that, once we have identified the source of these misleading intuitions, Frege’s puzzle and related puzzles to do with psychological explanation appear much less puzzling.

A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 16

A Confederacy of Dunces

“I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery” (p. 52).

An Introduction to Ontology: From Aristotle to the Universal Core

ontology

Check out this eight part lecture series from the dean of current ontology studies.

Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing

music

Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor on the neuroscience of music

MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.

Minds, Intrinsic Properties, and Madhyamaka Buddhism

extended mind, externalism

Here is the intro to Teed’s article.

Those of us who defend the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) get criticized from two different perspectives which, to use a political metaphor, could be called radical and conservative. Because HEC was born in the cognitive science community, most of the criticism comes from epistemological conservatives i. e. from those who want to conserve the idea that the mind is best described as being in some sense identified with the brain. These critics want to be assured that there is some place where the mind stops and the world begins, and believe that the brain is the best place to draw the line. Outside the orthodox cognitive science community, however, there are readers from the radical epistemological “left,” who welcome HEC as some version of the claim that we are “one with everything”. The most articulate and cautious of these radicals is David Skrbina, who argues that if I were to follow through with my own logic, I would accept “a kind of full-blown panpsychism” (Skrbina 2006). It is possible that I could be persuaded to agree with Skrbina about this, depending on how we define our terms, and what level of reality he is willing to grant to discrete individual minds. That, however, would be a topic for another time. In this paper, I will only concern myself with those who see my position (whether approvingly or disapprovingly) as a kind of muddled monistic mysticism. These causal readers serve an important function in the debate, by providing a reductio ad absurdum argument against HEC for the Conservatives. If HEC really required us to abandon all distinctions between mind and world, it could not be the next paradigm in Cognitive Science. On the contrary, it would require us to abandon cognitive science altogether. One reason that my version of HEC sometimes receives this radical interpretation is that I believe the mind is best described as a behavioral field, rather than a single item such as a brain or a body. There is also the fact that I occasionally describe this behavioral field with somewhat evocative language that might be appealing to the radicals, such as “Consciousness could be a pattern which, like a vibration started by throwing a stone in the water, ripples through the world even though there is a biological creature at its center” (Rockwell 2005, 103). However, it is my intention to position myself in a kind of “middle way” between these radical and conservative extremes, even though my position is more radical than some other HEC theorists. For example, Andy Clark’s version of HEC does try to give fairly hard and fast criteria for identifying the mind with certain kinds of external cognitive “scaffolding”, such as the note book that aides the memory of someone with Alzheimer’s disease. (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 17). Unlike Clark, however, I am inclined to believe that drawing a single line between the self and the world outside the brain is probably even more misleading than trying to draw the line at the brain. Consequently, I think we should abandon the idea that there is a single place where the line can always be drawn. This is what makes some of my readers accuse me of rejecting “the analytic distinctions of self and world.” (McCarthy 2006), and thus embracing the radical “we are one with everything” position. This is a misinterpretation, however, because I also insist that “To say that the mind emerges from the brain-body-world nexus does not mean that there is no world, only a mind. The line between the self and the world must always be drawn somewhere . . .That is what it means to live in a world.” (Rockwell 2005, 104) I do not identify the mind with the entire brain-body-world nexus, because I believe that the line between the self and world must be drawn somewhere at any given moment. But this does not necessarily imply that there is a single place that the line can be drawn for all conscious creatures, or for a single conscious creature throughout its history. A great deal of useful scientific work can be done by drawing the line at the skull, but the books that defend HEC describe scientific work that needs to draw the line in a variety of other places. I think the best way to account for both mainstream neuroscience and this other more problematic work is to see the boundary between self and world as flexible. That is why I feel the mind is best described as a behavioral field rather than as an organ in the skull.

The End

music

Everytime I hear that song, it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song…. Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.

Jim Morrison

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes…again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need…of some…stranger’s hand
In a…desperate land
Lost in a Roman…wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town
Ride the King’s highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake…he’s old, and his skin is cold
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is callin’ us
The blue bus is callin’ us
Driver, where you taken’ us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door…and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother…I want to…WAAAAAA
C’mon baby,——— No “take a chance with us”
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
C’mon, yeah
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end

The social-cognitive dynamics of metaphor performance

cognition, cognitive science

Here is the into to Raymond and Lynne’s paper:

Any extended analysis of everyday talk reveals the presence of stretches of language that convey metaphorical meaning. Consider, as one example, the following remarkable conversation between Jo Berry, whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by a bomb in 1984, and Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb on behalf on the Irish Republican Army during their conflict with the British government. Jo Berry had asked to meet Pat Magee in order to understand more about why the bombing happened, and they first met in 1999, after Pat Magee was released from prison under a peace agreement. Extract 1 comes from the first of the conversations and shows Jo explaining why she wanted to meet Pat. She refers to moment of the bombing in line 91 and to meeting Pat in lines 103 and 104.

Extract 1
90 Jo …I knew,
91 …(2.0) backin the moment,
92 wh- what I wanted to do,
93 … was bring as much –
94 …(2.0) something –
95 … as much positive out of it as I could.
96 … you know,
97 Pat [hmh]
98 Jo …(1.0) [and] I –
99 and I saw very clearly.
100 …(1.0) that the –
101 …the end of that journey,
102 would be,
103 …sitting down and,
104 …talking to the people who did it.
105 Pat … hmh
106 Jo … that just camein a moment,
107 and then went away,
108 and then –
109 … there’s been a longlong .. 16 years of [getting to this point].
110 Pat [hmh hmh]

There are several instances of metaphorically used words and phrases in this excerpt, which we have underlined. For instance, “back in” in line 91 conveys the idea of Jo’s remembering the bombing as if she were physically moving back into a specific spatial location. The idea of being able to “bring” “something” “out of it” refers to Jo’s mental reconstructing the bombing in terms of movement from one physical location to another, but this time in the possession of an important object (i.e., a new understanding). We also see in lines 99–101 that Jo conceives this process of reconciliation, and sitting down to talk with Pat, as the endpoint of a physical journey along some path where the psychological goal is understood as a destination (i.e., endpoint) on the path.

Why do speakers, like Jo, talk in these metaphorical ways, and what motivates them to utter the particular words they do to achieve different communicative effects? Is the use of metaphoric words and phrases idiosyncratic or can it be explained in some principled manner? The vast interdisciplinary research on metaphor use and understanding suggests that there are multiple reasons for why people speak metaphorically. Quite roughly, the possible reasons for speaking metaphorically refer to bodily, cognitive, linguistic, social, and cultural variables. For instance, people may employ certain metaphoric words and phrases because they typically think about particular, usually abstract, domains in metaphoric terms (cognitive), because there is no way to express specific meanings in a language without using metaphor (linguistic), because they wish to impress or persuade another person by the words used (social), and/or because their cultural beliefs and norms are conventionally encoded in specific metaphorical themes (cultural). Much of the contemporary scholarship in metaphor studies debates these, and other, possible reasons for why people use metaphorical language and how they interpret metaphors in discourse. This has led to a vast complex of alternative methods, empirical findings, and theories of metaphor use, with individual metaphor scholars exhibiting the strong tendency to focus on certain aspects of metaphor and adopt one perspective on metaphor use (e.g., cognitive or linguistic) while downplaying or ignoring others (e.g., social or cultural).

We believe that all these varying perspectives on metaphor have the potential to offer important insights into the use and understanding of metaphor in discourse. But the vast number of possible factors involved in metaphor use, and their complex interactions, makes it difficult to adjudicate between competing theories. Our aim is in this article is to suggest a different way of looking at metaphor by embracing a dynamical systems approach that better captures the total ecology of human behavior, and more specifically metaphor performance. The key to this idea is the recognition that metaphor performance is shaped by discourse processes that operate in a continual dynamic interaction between individual cognition and the social and physical environment. Dynamical approaches to human action attempt to describe how the body’s continuous interactions with the world, including other people, provide for coordinated patterns of adaptive behavior. Simple and complex behaviors are higher-order products of self-organization processes that emerge from both intra and interpersonal interactions. We argue that the complexities of metaphoric language use (i.e., how people coordinate with each other through metaphor) emerge from self-organizational processes that operate along a range of different time-scales, from the millisecond to the evolutionary, and across a range of scales of social group size, from the individual and dyad to the speech community. The phenomena of metaphor performance are, we suggest, best studied in terms of continuously dynamic discourse processes. This framework for studying metaphor recasts some traditional questions about metaphor use and understanding and suggests the need for a closer link in characterizing social and cognitive processes in human behavior.