"All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)
"Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)
"In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"It is impossible for the behavior of a single, isolated individual to reach a high degree of rationality. The number of alternatives he must explore is so great, the information he would need to evaluate them so vast that even an approximation to objective rationality is hard to conceive. Individual choice takes place in rationality is hard to conceive. [...] Actual behavior falls short in at least three ways, of objective rationality." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)
"Rationality requires a choice among all possible alternative behaviors. In actual behavior, only a very few of all these possible alternatives come to mind." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)
"The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world - or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal." (Herbert A Simon, "Models of Man", 1957)
"The mathematical and computing techniques for making programmed decisions replace man but they do not generally simulate him." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)
"Programs do not merely substitute brute force for human cunning. Increasingly, they imitate-and in some cases improve upon-human cunning." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)
"Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole." (Herbert A Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106 (6), 1962)
"Thus, the central theme that runs through my remarks is that complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy, and that hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content. Hierarchy, I shall argue, is one of the central structural schemes that the architect of complexity uses." (Herbert A Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 106 (6), 1962)
"A mathematical proof, as usually written down, is a sequence of expressions in the state space. But we may also think of the proof as consisting of the sequence of justifications of consecutive proof steps - i.e., the references to axioms, previously-proved theorems, and rules of inference that legitimize the writing down of the proof steps. From this point of view, the proof is a sequence of actions (applications of rules of inference) that, operating initially on the axioms, transform them into the desired theorem." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)
"[...] a problem of design exists when (1) there is a language for naming actions and a language for naming states of the world, (2) there is a need to find an action that will produce a specified state of the world or a specified change in the state of the world, and (3) there is no non-trivial process for translating changes in the state of the world into their corresponding actions." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)
"A problem will be difficult if there are no procedures for generating possible solutions that are guaranteed (or at least likely) to generate the actual solution rather early in the game. But for such a procedure to exist, there must be some kind of structural relation, at least approximate, between the possible solutions as named by the solution-generating process and these same solutions as named in the language of the problem statement." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)
"An adaptive organism is connected with its environment by two kinds of channels. Afferent channels give it information about the state of the environment; efferent channels cause action on the environment. Problem statements define solutions in terms of afferent information to the organism; the organism's task is to discover a set of efferent signals which, changing the state of the environment, will produce the appropriate afferent. But, ab initio, the mapping of efferents on afferents is entirely arbitrary; the relations can only be discovered by experiment, by acting and observing the consequences of action." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)
"Design problems - generating or discovering alternatives - are complex largely because they involve two spaces, an action space and a state space, that generally have completely different structures. To find a design requires mapping the former of these on the latter. For many, if not most, design problems in the real world systematic algorithms are not known that guarantee solutions with reasonable amounts of computing effort. Design uses a wide range of heuristic devices - like means-end analysis, satisficing, and the other procedures that have been outlined - that have been found by experience to enhance the efficiency of search. Much remains to be learned about the nature and effectiveness of these devices." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)
"Every problem-solving effort must begin with creating a representation for the problem - a problem space in which the search for the solution can take place. Of course, for most of the problems we encounter in our daily personal or professional lives, we simply retrieve from memory a representation that we have already stored and used on previous occasions. Sometimes, we have to adapt the representation a bit to the new situation, but that is usually a rather simple matter." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"Natural science is knowledge about natural objects and phenomena." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment. Understanding systems, especially systems capable of understanding problems in new task domains, are learning systems." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"Making discoveries belongs to the class of ill-structured problem-solving tasks that have relatively ill-defined goals." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos. […] This is the task of natural science: to show that the wonderful is not incomprehensible, to show how it can be comprehended - but not to destroy wonder. For when we have explained the wonderful, unmasked the hidden pattern, a new wonder arises at how complexity was woven out of simplicity. The aesthetics of natural science and mathematics is at one with the aesthetics of music and painting - both inhere in the discovery of a partially concealed pattern." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"The more we are willing to abstract from the detail of a set of phenomena, the easier it becomes to simulate the phenomena. Moreover we do not have to know, or guess at, all the internal structure of the system but only that part of it that is crucial to the abstraction." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)
"[...] in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", 1971)
"But the answers provided by the theory of games are sometimes very puzzling and ambiguous. In many situations, no single course of action dominates all the others; instead, a whole set of possible solutions are all equally consistent with the postulates of rationality." (Herbert A Simon et al, "Decision Making and Problem Solving", Interfaces Vol. 17 (5), 1987)
"[...] problem solving generally proceeds by selective search through large sets of possibilities, using rules of thumb (heuristics) to guide the search. Because the possibilities in realistic problem situations are generally multitudinous, trial-and-error search would simply not work; the search must be highly selective." (Herbert A Simon et al, "Decision Making and Problem Solving", Interfaces Vol. 17 (5), 1987)
"The way in which an uncertain possibility is presented may
have a substantial effect on how people respond to it."
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