How do systems pursue goals with limited resources, and how do organizations shape their choices? This route connects selected concepts from Herbert A. Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (third edition, 1996) and Administrative Behavior (fourth edition, 1997). Each entry cites inspected passages; these are selected readings, not a summary of both books in full.
Design under constraints
- Artifact interface — the relation among a system’s organization, environment, and purpose.
- Bounded rationality — limits on knowledge, anticipation, attention, and alternatives considered.
- Satisficing — searching for an alternative that meets stated standards of acceptability.
- Means–ends analysis — selecting actions by relating state differences to relevant operators.
- Near decomposability — stronger within-subsystem interactions and weaker, slower cross-subsystem effects.
Organizational choice
- Fact–value distinction — separating empirical premises from preferred ends in Simon’s framework.
- Decision premises — how information and commitments structure a choice.
- Organizational authority — accepting another’s decision as a premise, with Simon’s qualifications concerning expertise and persuasion.
Suggested order: read bounded rationality before satisficing, because Simon’s commentary presents satisficing and a simplified world model as the two features of bounded rationality. Read the fact–value distinction before decision premises, and decision premises before organizational authority. When comparing these entries with Agent, Policy, or Context window, compare the questions each one answers rather than treating the definitions as equivalent. A model-input limit, for example, is narrower than Simon’s limits on attention and on the alternatives considered.
Continue to Agent foundations for perception–action and POMDP formulations, or Memory and information for retained and retrieved information. The agent examples are our own illustrative applications. They are not attributed to Simon and do not imply that he wrote about contemporary LLM assistants.