Herbert Simon on mind as computer

Herbert Simon had the courage to preach the heresy of bounded rationality to economists and the unorthodoxy to maintain that computer programs are psychological theories to psychologists. His view of the mind as a computer became the basis of his approach to artificial intelligence: using heuristics to make computers smart. For Simon, psychological concepts such as heuristic search have the power to integrate various disciplines. As a believer in continuous progress, he insisted that the theory of mind as a computer was continuous with earlier psychology. Yet the idea that cognition is computation is strikingly absent in the psychological theories of the time. Where did Simon’s idea of the mind as a computer originate? In his own work on scientific discovery, Simon focused on data-driven discovery of laws. In a previous paper of ours, we argued that his view was driven by new tools, not data - an instance of the tools-to-theories process of discovery. Simon sent us a series of comments in response. In this chapter, we draw on some of Simon’s comments to exemplify his thinking and beliefs, and to provide a glimpse at his scientific persona.