Models Of Man

Essays that pay tribute to the wide-ranging influence of the late Herbert Simon, by friends and colleagues. Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in the social and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. His well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making and problem-solving processes for the social sciences. This book (the title is a variation on the title of Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, by colleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt." Each of the more than forty contributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found most influential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizations and Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include such prominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they consider topics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollections from 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon—to see the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines.

This classic book is Martin Hollis's influential rationalist account and exploration of human action and identity.

First Published in 1975. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This essay is, first, a theoretical and historical study of some classical scientific ways of studying human being in the world. The more readily accessible and more commonly discussed "models" of being human were chosen for review here, but structuralism is included because I believe it will have ,the same impact in America as it has had in France, and I hope that American readers might be forewarned about what may be ideologically at stake before the technical, and fruitful, aspects of the movement become an academic fad in the United States. The subjects included are mainline experimental psychology from Wundt to Skinner, with its relatively shortlived functionalist and Watsonian-behaviorist formulations; holistic psychology from Brentano through Stumpf, Husserl, and Goldstein to Maslow, Rogers, and contemporary "third force" psychology; and the psychoanalytic model, for which the only paradigm is Freud himself. Preeminence is given to psychological paradigms, since their subject matter lies closest to the classical philosophical tradition from which "philosophical anthropology" emerged. (This book is, in the final analysis, a prolegomenon to an articulated philosophical anthropo logy. ) Sociological models are also considered: the "classical" tradition from Comte to the present, and Marxist anthropology from the manu scripts of 1844 to the present. The structuralist model, from Durkheim to Chomsky, is also considered, since it cuts across and gives new dimensions to all the foregoing models. The essay is, second, a phenomenological critique of these historico theoretical considerations.