Abstract
The task of a comprehensive theory of action is to describe or prescribe the occasions for action, the alternative courses of action (or the means of discovering them), and the choice among action alternatives. The task of a comprehensive logic of action is to describe or prescribe the rules that govern reasoning about the occasions for action, the discovery of action alternatives, and the choice of action.
[Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967, pp. 1–20].
The work reported here was supported in part by Public Health Service Research Grant MH-07722-01 from the National Institutes of Mental Health. I am indebted to Allen Newell for numerous comments and suggestions.
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Notes
An excellent example of this approach is G. H. von Wright’s Norm and Action (New York: The Humanities Press, 1963).
H. A. Simon, ‘The Logic of Rational Decision’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16, 169–186 (1965), (reprinted as Chapter 3.1 of this volume).
Ibid. For fuller discussion of the contextual conditions for a model of an action system see my ‘Causal Ordering and Identifiability’, (reprinted as Chapter 2.1 of this volume); and J. Marschak, ‘Statistical Inference in Economics: An Introduction’, in T. C. Koopmans (ed.), Statistical Inference in Dynamic Economic Models, Cowles Commission Monograph No. 10 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1950). ch. 1.
The requirements for the design of systems of this kind are outlined in my ‘Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment’, Chapter 15 of Models of Man, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1953).
K. J. Arrow, T. Harris, and J. Marschak, ‘Optimal Inventory Policy’, Econometrica 19, 250–272 (1951).
Op. cit., p. 179.
Op. cit., pp. 179–186.
‘The Inversion of Functions Defined by Turing Machines’, in C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy (eds.), Automata Studies (Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 177.
Since the organism is a product of evolution, which may already have produced a partial matching between efferents and afferents, the ‘arbitrariness’ of the relation may be overstated here.
A number of descriptions of GPS have been published. For the purposes of this discussion, I recommend the one in Contemporary Approaches to Creative Thinking, Howard E. Gruber, Glenn Terell, Michael Wertheimer (eds.) (New York: The Atherton Press, 1962), pp. 63–119. See also Chapter 5.1 of this volume.
For a more thorough discussion of satisficing see ‘A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice’, in Models of Man, op. cit.
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© 1977 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Simon, H.A. (1977). The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making. In: Models of Discovery. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9521-1_10
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