Herbert Simon. Artificial intelligence as a framework for understanding intuition

Herbert Simon made overlapping substantive contributions to the fields of economics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, decision theory, and organization theory. Simon s work was motivated by the belief that neither the human mind, human thinking and decision making, nor human creativity need be mysterious. It was after he helped create ‘‘thinking’’ machines that Simon came to understand human intuition as subconscious pattern recognition. In doing so he showed that intuition need not be associated with magic and mysticism, and that it is complementary with analytical thinking. This paper will show how the overlaps in his work and especially his work on AI affected his view towards intuition. 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PsycINFO classification: 2140, 4120 JEL classification: B21, B30