The Sciences of the Artificial

As creatures of bounded rationality, incapable of dealing with the world in all of its complexity, we form a simplified picture of the world, viewing it from our particular organizational vantage point and our organization’s interests and goals.

The previous chapters have shown that a science of artificial phenomena is always in imminent danger of dissolving and vanishing. The peculiar properties of the artifact lie on the thin interface between the natural laws within it and the natural laws without.

Not only are such systems capable of discovering new concepts but also they can plan sequences of experiments, postulate reaction paths for complex chemical reactions, induce rules for interpreting data from mass spectrogram analysis, and enlarge the state space of a system to accommodate variables that are not directly observable.

A paradoxical, but perhaps realistic, view of design goals is that their function is to motivate activity which in turn will generate new goals.

Ability to attain goals depends on building up associations, which may be simple or very complex, between particular changes in states of the world and particular actions that will (reliably or not) bring these changes about.

The rules imposed upon us by organizations—the organizations that employ us and the organizations that govern us—restrict our liberties in a variety of ways. But these same organizations provide us with opportunities for reaching goals and attaining freedoms that we could not even imagine reaching by individual effort.

But they can be viewed more generally as processes for gathering information about problem structure that will ultimately be valuable in discovering a problem solution. The latter viewpoint is more general than the former in a significant sense, in that it suggests that information obtained along any particular branch of a search tree may be used i

What is striking about these documents is their practical sense and the awareness they exude of the limits of foresight about large human affairs.

All mathematics exhibits in its conclusions only what is already implicit in its premises,

Now no one in his right mind will satisfice if he can equally well optimize; no one will settle for good or better if he can have best. But that is not the way the problem usually poses itself in actual design situations.