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Colin Blakemore: 1944-2022

Back in the day I enjoyed Blakemore’s BBC series (with accompanying book) The Mind Machine, several episodes available on YouTube. Also well-worth a read (coedited with Susan Greenfield) is the book Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity, and Consciousness. See the obit On Colin. Cognitive sciencecolin blakemoreconsciousnessneurosciencePhilosophy of mindsusan greenfield

The Kathy Wilkes Memorial Conference 

Beginning this year (tomorrow), The Herbert Simon Society (Turin), IUC Dubrovnik, and St. Hilda’s College Oxford are putting on an annual conference to honour Kathy Wilkes. The conference deals with the impact of the cognitive sciences on the social, political and economic sciences. For online attendance details, contact Giovanni De Rosa. It was through Roger…

The Cognitive Dimension

The always subtle (philosophically, historically, and most especially, sociologically) Stephen Turner. His piece is freely available here. Cognitive sciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindStephen Turner

From Bounded Rationality to Expertise

The ninth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Fernand Gobet Introduction Historically, a pervasive assumption in the social sciences, in particular economics, is that humans are perfect rational agents. Having full access to information and enjoying unlimited computational resources, they maximise utility when…

Boundedly Rational Decision-Making under Certainty and Uncertainty: Some Reflections on Herbert Simon

The sixth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Mark Pingle Introduction Our collective rationality became more bounded on February 9, 2001. Herbert Simon emphasized we humans are cognitively constrained, and those constraints impact our decisions. Yet, Herbert Simon’s mind was less constrained than most of…

Rationality and the true human condition

The fifth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Ron Sun The notion of rationality is important to many fields in social and behavioral sciences. Herbert Simon’s seminal work on “bounded rationality” and “satisficing” led to broadened conceptions of rationality, which significantly impacted a number of…

From The Sciences of the Artificial to Cognitive History

The fourth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Subrata Dasgupta It is well known that Herbert Simon was a 20th century scientific polymath who made seminal contributions to the social sciences, behavioral sciences, design theory, computer science, and the philosophy of science (Dasgupta, 2003a, 2003b).…

Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simon’s 21st-Century Mind

The second in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Robert D. Rupert One can hardly underestimate Herbert Simon’s influence on contemporary cognitive science and empirically oriented philosophy of mind. Working with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and the Rand Corporation, he wrote Logic Theorist and General Problem…