The Sciences of the Artificial (The MIT Press)

by Herbert A. Simon

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent—not with how things are but with how they might be—in short, with design. The possibility of creating a science or sciences of design is exactly as great as the possibility of creating any science of the artificial. The two possibilities stand or fall together.

This relation of program to environment opened up an exceedingly important role for computer simulation as a tool for achieving a deeper understanding of human behavior. For if it is the organization of components, and not their physical properties, that largely determines behavior, and if computers are organized somewhat in the image of man, then the computer becomes an obvious device for exploring the consequences of alternative organizational assumptions for human behavior.

Because of their bounded rationality, and because they can therefore greatly enhance their limited knowledge and skill by accepting information and advice from the social groups to which they belong, individuals who are docile—who tend to accept such information and advice—have a great advantage in fitness over those who are not docile—who reject social influence. Docile people do not have to learn about hot stoves by touching them.

There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories.

The Club of Rome report predicted too little because it emphasized a single possible time path rather than focusing upon alternative futures. The heart of the data problem for design is not forecasting but constructing alternative scenarios for the future and analyzing their sensitivity to errors in the theory and data.