1
Herbert Simon: A Hedgehog and a Fox
Roger Frantz and Leslie Marsh
A Quality of Mind
If as Archilochusâ famous fragment goes âThe fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thingâ then Herbert Simon is, at face value, a star example of a fox. Popularized by Isaiah Berlin (1978), the foxâhedgehog distinction has been interpreted (overly simplistically as Berlin acknowledged) in terms of mutually exclusive or ideal types. Hedgehog-type intelligences are motivated by an overarching grand idea or scheme that they then apply to â or through which they filter â everything else. By contrast, fox-type intelligences are highly adaptive and come up with new ideas more suited to a specific situation or context. We are of the view that the supposed hedgehogâfox dichotomy is way too trite and one-dimensional an assessment of Simon. If there were a golden thread to Simonâs work it would be the development of a more adequate theory of human problem-solving and derivatively (but no less deeply) his interest in the computer simulation of human cognition â all in the service of the former (Frantz and Marsh, 2014). The upshot is that Simon made significant contributions to economics, political science, epistemology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, public administration, organization theory, and complexity studies (and more besides); and while ascriptions of âpolymathâ and âRenaissance manâ are not without merit, they gloss over the distinctive quality of such a mind. As Simon himself has said:
the âRenaissance Mindâ 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)
This is reiterated by the Edward Feigenbaum quote that Simonâs daughter, Kathie, cites 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, âI am a monomaniac. What I am a monomaniac about is decision-making.â
So without fear of paradox Herbert Simon, we contend, was both a hedgehog and a fox, a notion fully compatible with his intellectual trajectory, a career âsettled at least as much by drift as by choiceâ (Lindbeck, 1992). Yet despite the superlatives accorded to Simon, 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. Indeed, much of the criticism that followed his award of the Nobel Prize in 1978 was because he wasnât an âeconomistâ! This despite Shackleâs recommendation 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)
Indeed, Hayek, who like Simon had long since given up writing on technical economics by the time of his Nobel award (1974), wrote:
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)
For Simon the diverse disciplines were not conventionally discontinuous but merely different lenses through which Simon approached his central lifelong concern â the theorizing of human behavior, or rationality, or decision-making in complex social environments. The situated agent necessarily has imperfect knowledge: knowledge is incomplete, distributed and error prone, subject to limited computational power and time constraints in an ever dynamic environment. All we really have are satisfactory or good enough choices if one is to function.
Marking a Centenary
Though the commemoration of Simonâs centenary provides a convenient hook, the motivation behind compiling this volume has substantive intent in that over the past decade or so there has been noticeable convergence on Simonâs aforementioned âgolden thread.â Perhaps Simonâs most natural intellectual ally, the so-called Austrian tradition, has somewhat belatedly taken him to be an âhonorary memberâ of that tradition since both emphasize the lived subjectivity of experience (Doyle and Marsh, 2012). Though Simon has been associated as a founder of classical (Cartesian) artificial intelligence (Frantz, 2003), the development of his work on real life decision-making has reoriented Simon as a âsituatedâ theorist congenial to the non-Cartesian wing of cognitive science and philosophy of mind (Marsh, 2012). Analytical epistemology in the PlatoâDescartes tradition is now supplementing its unremittingly hard-nosed individualism with acknowledgement of the ubiquitous (complex) sociality and computational constraints that orthodox economic and political rationalisms have failed so miserably to deal with adequately (Frantz, 2005). For Simon human intellectual curiosity is a virtue so long as it is tempered by epistemic modesty.
We wish to acknowledge the publication of a fine biography (Crowther-Heyck, 2005) and for all intents and purposes a most expansive Gedenkschrift (Augier and March, 2004). We view this present volume as continuous with the Augier and March project with several contributors generously reprising their participation along with some newer voices adding to the chorus of appreciation for Simon. A themed issue of Mind & Society (Novarese and Viale, 2014) grew out of the first meeting of the Herbert Simon Society (http://herbertsimonsociety.org.), and collectively these major publications act as a barometer for the sustained and growing interest in Simon. It is perhaps not too much of an overstatement to say that, with the confluence of the diverse research projects and disciplines outlined earlier, there is now plausibly something called Simon Studies. Simonâs place in the history of ideas across several dimensions is very secure, and it needs to be recognized that he (along with his near contemporary Friedrich Hayek) is very much a part of a tradition that goes back to Adam Smith.
References
Augier, M. and March, J. G. (eds). (2004). Models of a Man: Essays in Memory of Herbert A. Simon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Berlin, I. (1978). The Hedgehog and the Fox. In Russian Thinkers, ed. H. Hardy. London: Hogarth.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (2005). Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Doyle, M. J. and Marsh, L. (2012). Stigmergy 3.0: From Ants to Economies. Cognitive Systems Research, 21: 1â6.
Frantz, R. (2003). Herbert Simon: Artificial Intelligence as a Framework for Understanding Intuition. Journal of Economic Psychology, 24, 265â77.
Frantz, R. (2005). Two Minds: Intuition and Analysis in the History of Economic Thought. Heidelberg: Springer.
Frantz, R. and Marsh, L. (2014). Herbert Simon. In Real World Decision Making: An Encyclopedia of Behavioral Economics, ed. Morris Altman. Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Hayek, F. A. (1967). Studies on Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lindbeck, A. (ed.). (1992). Herbert A. Simon: Biographical. In Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969â1980, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co.
Marsh, L. (2012). Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension. In Hayek and Behavioral Economics, ed. R. Frantz and R. Leeson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Novarese, M. and Viale, R. (2014). Special Issue on âBounded Rationality Updatedâ. Mind & Society, 13 (1).
Shackle, G. L. S. (2010). Uncertainty in Economics and Other Reflections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Subrata, S. (2003). Multidisciplinary Creativity: The Case of Herbert A. Simon. Cognitive Science, 27: 683â707.
Part I
Minds
2
Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simonâs Twenty-first Century Mind
Robert D. Rupert
Introduction
One can hardly overestimate Herbert Simonâs 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 Solver (GPS) and thereby helped to set the agenda for early work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Simon and Newell, 1971). These projects also provided AI with some of its fundamental tools: in their work in the 1950s on Logic Theorist and other programs, Simon and colleagues invented list processing (which, in John McCarthyâs hands, became LISP â McCarthy, 1960), while the conceptual framework of GPS gave birth to production systems (and became SOAR â Rosenbloom et al., 1991). In 1981, John Haugeland included Newell and Simonâs computationalist manifesto (âComputer science as empirical enquiry: Symbols and searchâ â Newell and Simon 1976) in his widely read anthology Mind Design (Haugeland, 1981). As a result, the names of Newell and Simon became, in the philosophical world, nearly synonymous with the computational theory of the mind â at the top of the list with Fodorâs (1975) and Pylyshynâs (1984). Moreover, in their early work, Simon and the CarnegieâRand group emphasized the relative independence of an information-processing-based characterization of thought from the material components of the system so engaged (Newell et al., 1958a, p. 51; 1958b, p. 163, cf. Vera and Simon, 1993, p. 9). Prominent philosophers, most notably Putnam (1960, 1963, 1967) and Fodor (1974), reified this distinctively functional level of description, thereby formulating the late-twentieth centuryâs dominant metaphysics of mind, functionalism, according to which mental states are, by their nature, multiply realizable functional states.
The list of Simonâs influential ideas extends much further than this, however. Arguably, Simonâs work on hierarchical structure and the near-decomposability of complex systems (1996, chapter 8) planted the seeds of modularity-based thinking, which blossomed in the work of Marr (1982), Fodor (1983), and evolutionary psychologists (Barkow et al., 1992; Pinker, 1997). In addition, Simonâs (1996) emphasis on satisficing and the bounded nature of rationality set the stage for the fascinating research programs of such varied figures as Gerd Gigerenzer (2000), Christopher Cherniak (1986), and Ron McClamrock (1995). In fact, in conjunction with Kahneman and Tverskyâs heuristics and biases program (Kahneman et al., 1982), Simonâs observations about the bounded nature of rationality yielded what is now the leading view of human cognition: itâs the work of a complex but nonoptimized system that manages surprisingly well by deploying its limited resources in a context-specific way â that is, in a way that exploits a grab-bag of relatively domain-specific shortcuts that are reasonably reliable given the environments in which theyâre typically employed. At the same time, Simon sometimes emphasized adaptive rationality â the idea that, under a wide range of circumstances, intelligent human behavior is, given the subjectâs goals, a straightforward function of the structure of the task at hand â a theme appearing in the work of such luminaries as Dan Dennett (1987) and John Anderson (1990). Simon also articulated a vision of intelligent behavior as the product of simple, internal mechanisms interacting with a complex external environment and, in doing so, inspired nearly two generations of philosophers and cognitive scientists who take intelligence to be the by-product of, or to emerge from, bodily interaction with the environment (Clark, 1997; Brooks, 1999). In addition, Simon (1996, pp. 88, 94, 110) was perhaps the earliest working cognitive scientist explicitly to place aspects of internal processing on cognitive par with aspects of the environment external to the organism, a central theme in Andy Clark and David Chalmersâs enormously influential essay âThe Extended Mindâ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). There could scarcely be a more humbling list of one thinkerâs achievements, and little has been said about Simonâs contributions to our understanding of search algorithms, economics, design, or management!
As impressive as this list is, one might nevertheless wonder whether Simonâs views can be integrated into a single overarching vision of human cognition â of its structure, workings, and relation to the environment. Motivated by this kind of concern, I focus, in what follows, on an apparent inconsistency in Simonâs thinking, one that stands out especially clearly against the backdrop of decades of accumulated empirical results in what is sometimes known as âembodied cognitive scienceâ (Varela et al., 1991; Clark, 1997, 2008b; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Rowlands, 1999; Gallagher, 2005; Gibbs, 2006; Rupert, 2006, 2009, 2011; Shapiro, 2010; Wilson and Foglia, 2011). At first blush, embodied results seem to support certain strands of Simonâs thought at the expense of others. I argue, however, that even in cases in which Simonâs pronouncements about the mind were premature or his emphasis out of balance (e.g., not sufficiently oriented toward the body-based contributions to human cognition), many of his own views about the mind provide the necessary corrective and allow him to accommodate â even anticipate â embodiment-oriented insights. Simon...