(1) Levels of organization (LoOs) support an ontological approach, according to which the system under analysis is supposed to have a (usually hierarchical) structure in itself, or de re, which is allegedly uncovered by its description and …Russell, B. (1902). Letter to Frege. In J. van Heijenoort (Ed.), From frege to gödel: A source book in mathematical logic, 1879–1931 (pp. 124–125). Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1967.
Salthe, S. N. (1985). Evolving hierarchical s…
Herbert A. Simon
scientist · 3 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Herbert Simon appears in the course as a foundational figure connecting cybernetics, bounded rationality, and early AI's ambitions to mechanize decision-making and thought itself. The readings position him as the inheritor of Von Neumann's computational program, extending rationalization—the characteristic logic of both bureaucracy and capitalism—into a totalizing framework of algorithmic modeling. His theories of satisficing and bounded rationality become crucial to understanding how AI systems came to replicate human cognitive limitations rather than transcend them, making him essential to the course's genealogy of how machines learned to think like organizations.
Background
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He and Allen Newell received the ACM Turing Award in 1975, and he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978.
Wikipedia →Mentioned in 2 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Akos Egyed 1Alfred Tarski 1Bertrand Russell 1Brown 1Carl Craver 1Gordon Globus 1Gottlob Frege 1Grover Maxwell 1Irving Savodnik 1J. A. Scott Kelso 1J. M. Spivey 1Jean van Heijenoort 1Jonathan Schaffer 1Leonard Linsky 1Michael A. Arbib 1Murray Gell-Mann 1Nenad Medvidovic 1Plotinus 1Robert C. Richardson 1Roberto Poli 1Stanley Salthe 1William Bechtel 1William C. Wimsatt 1Zenon Pylyshyn 1Allen Newell 1Benjamin 1Mihajlo D. Mesarovic 1John von Neumann 1