What can reason (or more broadly, thinking) do for us and what can't it do? This is the question examined by the author, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering work on decision-making processes in economic organizations."

In this candid and witty autobiography, Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon looks at his distinguished and varied career, continually asking himself whether (and how) what he learned as a scientist helps to explain other aspects of his life.A brilliant polymath in an age of increasing specialization, Simon is one of those rare scholars whose work defines fields of inquiry. Crossing disciplinary lines in half a dozen fields, Simon's story encompasses an explosion in the information sciences, the transformation of psychology by the information-processing paradigm, and the use of computer simulation for modeling the behavior of highly complex systems.Simon's theory of bounded rationality led to a Nobel Prize in economics, and his work on building machines that think—based on the notion that human intelligence is the rule-governed manipulation of symbols—laid conceptual foundations for the new cognitive science. Subsequently, contrasting metaphors of the maze (Simon's view) and of the mind (neural nets) have dominated the artificial intelligence debate.There is also a warm account of his successful marriage and of an unconsummated love affair, letters to his children, columns, a short story, and political and personal intrigue in academe.

Description

In this fourth edition of his ground-breaking work, Herbert A. Simon applies his pioneering theory of human choice and administrative decision-making to concrete organizational problems. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the book's original publication, Professor Simon enhances his timeless observations on the human decision-making process with commentaries examining new facets of organizational behavior. Investigating the impact of changing social values and modem technology on the operation of organizations, the new ideas featured in this revised edition update a book that has become a worldwide classic.

Named by Public Administration Review as "Book of the Half Century," Administrative Behavior is considered one of the most influential books on social science thinking, and was referred to by the Nobel Committee as "epoch-making."

Written for managers and other professionals who wish to understand the decision-making processes at the heart of organization and management, it is also essential reading for students in business and management, economics, sociology, psychology computer science, government, and law.

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Book Information
Free Press, March 1997
Hardcover, 384 pages
ISBN-10: 0-684-83582-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-83582-2

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools -- chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms -- for analyzing complexity and complex systems.There are updates throughout the book as well. These take into account important advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's basic thesis: that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action. The chapter "Economic Reality" has also been revised to reflect a change in emphasis in Simon's thinking about the respective roles of organizations and markets in economic systems.

This book provides the original and definitive treatments of such fundamental concepts as bounded rationality, attention focus, and problem solving.

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Herbert Simon in 1978. At Carnegie-Mellon University he holds the title of Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. These two facts together delineate the range and uniqueness of his contributions in creating meaningful interactions among fields that developed in isolation but that are all concerned with human decision-making and problem-solving processes.In particular, Simon has brought the insights of decision theory, organization theory (especially as it applies to the business firm), behavior modeling, cognitive psychology, and the study of artificial intelligence to bear on economic questions. This has led not only to new conceptual dimensions for theoretical constructions, but also to a new humanizing realism in economics, a way of taking into account and dealing with human behavior and interactions that lie at the root of all economic activity.The sixty papers and essays contained in these two volumes are grouped under eight sections, each with a brief introductory essay. These are: Some Questions of Public Policy, Dynamic Programming Under Uncertainty; Technological Change; The Structure of Economic Systems; The Business Firm as an Organization; The Economics of Information Processing; Economics and Psychology; and Substantive and Procedural Reality.Most of Simon's papers on classical and neoclassical economic theory are contained in volume one. The second volume collects his papers on behavioral theory, with some overlap between the two volumes.The second edition of Simon's widely read and referenced The Sciences of the Artificial was published by The MIT Press 1981 and is available in both hardcover and paperback.

Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon has in the past quarter century been in the front line of the information-processing revolution; in fact, to a remarkable extent his and his colleagues' contributions have written the history of that revolution in cognitive psychology. This book brings together papers dating from the start of Simon's career to the present. Its focus is on modeling the chief components of human cognition and on testing these models experimentally.

Since the publication of Ericsson and Simon's ground-breaking work in the early 1980s, verbal data has been used increasingly to study cognitive processes in many areas of psychology, and concurrent and retrospective verbal reports are now generally accepted as important sources of data on subjects' cognitive processes in specific tasks. In this revised edition of the book that first put protocol analysis on firm theoretical ground, the authors review major advances in verbal reports over the past decade, including new evidence on how giving verbal reports affects subjects' cognitive processes, and on the validity and completeness of such reports.In a substantial new preface Ericsson and Simon summarize the central issues covered in the book and provide an updated version of their information-processing model, which explains verbalization and verbal reports. They describe new studies on the effects of verbalization, interpreting the results of these studies and showing how their theory can be extended to account for them. Next, they address the issue of completeness of verbally reported information, reviewing the new evidence in three particularly active task domains. They conclude by citing recent contributions to the techniques for encoding protocols, raising general issues, and proposing directions for future research.All references and indexes have been updated.K. Anders Ericsson holds the Dr. Edward Conradi Eminent Scholar Chair of Psychology at Florida State University. Herbert Simon is Professor of Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978.

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled.
Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs - BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL - are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along.
Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science.
Pat Langley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Herbert Simon is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University. Gary L. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jan M. Zytkow is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wichita State University.

Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in the social and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. His well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making and problem-solving processes for the social sciences.This book (the title is a variation on the title of Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, by colleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt."Each of the more than forty contributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found most influential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizations and Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include such prominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they consider topics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollections from 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon -- to see the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines.