Table Of ContentModels of My Life
Models of My Life
Herbert A. Simon
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
First MIT Press edition, 1996
First published in 1991 by Basic Books.
© 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed on recycled paper and bound in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Simon, Herbert Alexander, 1916– Models of my life / Herbert A. Simon.—1st MIT Press
ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Basic Books, © 1991, in series: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation series.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-69185-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Simon, Herbert Alexander, 1916– . 2. Economists—
United States—Biography. I. Title.
HB119.S47A3 1996
330'.092—dc20
[B]
96-21495
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
ISBN 978-0-262-32658-2 (e-book)
To Dorothea, so aptly named
Contents
Preface to the MIT Press Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue
THE FIRST PANEL: JOURNEY TO A TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
1. The Boy in Wisconsin
2. Forests and Fields
3. Education in Chicago
4. Encounter with a Scientific Revolution: Political Science at Chicago
THE SECOND PANEL: THE SCIENTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
5. A Taste of Research: The City Managers’ Association
6. Managing Research: Berkeley
7. Teaching at Illinois Tech
8. A Matter of Loyalty
9. Building a Business School: The Graduate School of Industrial
Administration
10. Research and Science Politics
11. Mazes Without Minotaurs
12. Roots of Artificial Intelligence
13. Climbing the Mountain: Artificial Intelligence Achieved
THE THIRD PANEL: VIEW FROM THE MOUNTAIN
14. Exploring the Plain
15. Personal Threads in the Warp
16. Creating a University Environment for Cognitive Science and A.I.
17. On Being Argumentative
18. The Student Troubles
19. The Scientist as Politician
20. Foreign Adventures
THE FOURTH PANEL: RESEARCH AFTER SIXTY
21. From Nobel to Now
22. The Amateur Diplomat in China and the Soviet Union
23. Guides for Choice
Afterword: The Scientist as Problem Solver
References
Index
Preface to the MIT Press Edition
A continuing interest in my autobiography, which has been out of print for
several years, brings forth this new edition under the imprint of The MIT Press. I
am especially pleased that the book has struck a responsive chord in people,
some of them friends, some of them strangers, who find interesting and
informative its picture of a life in science. The account of what I have done with
my life (and what it has done with me) represents one scientist’s view of the
academic enterprise in general, and the research enterprise in particular: how one
pursues a life in science, and the satisfactions (and occasionally frustrations) it
can provide. Notice that I say, “a life in science,” not “a life of science,” for I
have tried to tell the whole story of growing up and living, a story in which
science has been a vital part but, for all that, only a part.
A number of readers have told me that the book’s picture of a scientist’s life
resonated sufficiently with their experiences that they presented copies to their
children or their students who were just embarking on such a life or considering
it. I hope that those who find it among their holiday or graduation gifts and those
who encounter it in their bookstores will be informed (and entertained) but not
misled by it. Science has been very good to me, and if they have a vocation for
it, it will likely be good to them.
The path I have followed has exposed me to a broad panorama of science. I
have wandered widely (always for reasons that, at the moment, seemed
compelling, you understand!) from political science and public administration,
through economics and cognitive psychology, to artificial intelligence and
computer science, with side excursions into the philosophy of science—
sometimes pursuing two or more of these simultaneously. My central interest in
decision making and problem solving led me to study the psychological
processes of scientific discovery, which, in turn, induced explorations of many
domains, especially in mathematics and the physical and biological sciences, that
go well beyond the areas mentioned above. So I hope that readers will not find it
hard to relate some of the events they meet here to their own favorite sciences. I
have also spent many hours and days engaged in the politics of science (I
hesitate to call it “statesmanship”), and particularly in helping to bring the social
and natural sciences together so that they can discharge their joint responsibility
for informing public policy.
Apart from correcting errors of fact and typography, I have not revised the
text of the first edition. The five years since I wrote Models of My Life have been
busy and exciting years, in which I have continued to pursue my (lengthening)
research agenda, but their flavor is not unlike that of the years just preceding
them. (Pages 327–331 still describe quite well the domains in which I am
active.) I have no startling new truths about Life to announce; my adventures
continue to be mainly adventures of the mind, as I am curently eschewing new
adventures by airplane. Hence I am content to leave the story in its original form.
I hope you enjoy it.
Herbert A. Simon
Pittsburgh, 1996
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to friends who have read and commented on earlier drafts
of this book: Mark Harris, Larry Holmes, Richard Kain, Pamela McCorduck,
Robert Merton, and my wife, Dorothea. They are not responsible for
imperfections in either my Life or my life.
Several parts of my account borrow freely from earlier writings. A chapter-
length autobiography in Gardner Lindzey, ed., A History of Psychology in
Autobiography, volume 7, provided a matrix that I have greatly expanded into
the present book. I am grateful to Gardner Lindzey, the copyright owner, for
permission to use this material.
An earlier version of chapter 4 was my Edmund Janes James Lecture of
October 10, 1985, given at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; it
was issued under the title “Charles E. Merriam and the ‘Chicago School’ of
Political Science” by the Department of Political Science at that university
(copyright © 1987 Herbert Simon).
The conversation with Jorge Luis Borges in chapter 11 took place in Buenos
Aires in December 1969, and a Spanish report of it was published in the January
1970 issue of Primera Plana, published by the Sociedad Argentina de
Informatica e Investigación Operativa (SADIO). The English version reproduced
here is my own retranslation from the Spanish (the conversation was in English).
Chapters 12, 13, and 14 draw upon the historical appendix to Allen Newell
and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving, copyright © 1972 (pages 873–
89) reprinted by permission of Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey.
The first portion of chapter 22, dealing with my 1972 trip to China, is based
on “Mao’s China in 1972,” published in Items 27 (no. 1): 1973, and reprinted
with permission from the Social Science Research Council.
An earlier form of chapter 23, titled “My Life Philosophy,” appeared in The
American Economist 29 (no. 1): 1985, and this modified version is reproduced
with the permission of that journal.
In 1987, when my colleagues in the Psychology Department told me that they
intended to make that year’s Spring Symposium a Festschrift to honor my
seventy years, I asked leave to give a paper at the Symposium on science as
problem solving. The Afterword is based on that paper “The Scientist as
