The Sciences of the Artificial

A computer program, UNDERSTAND, simulates the processes that people use to generate an internal representation of (to understand) a problem like A Tea Ceremony.78

we can often predict behavior from knowledge of the system’s goals and its outer environment, with only minimal assumptions about the inner environment.

But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be—how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

The organism must develop correlations between goals in the sensed world and actions in the world of process. When they are made conscious and verbalized, these correlations correspond to what we usually call means-ends analysis.

equilibrium is only local, and quite inferior to distant equilibria that cannot be reached by the up-hill climb of evolution.

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 possi

We have only a sketchy and incomplete knowledge of the different ways in which problems can be represented and much less knowledge of the significance of the differences.

We see in uncertainty a frequent source of advantage of organizations over markets as decision-making mechanisms.