CONCEPT
The Sciences of the Artificial
Herbert Simon's 1969 proposal that designed things deserve their own rigorous science—one that studies how artificial systems interface between their inner logic and the outer environments they must serve, and that makes the quality of that interface the central design problem.
In 1969, Herbert Simon published a slim and ambitious volume proposing something no one in the academy had previously proposed: that designed things deserve their own science. Not the science of physics, which studies the world as it is, nor the science of biology, which studies organisms shaped by natural selection over millions of years, but a different science entirely—the science of things that exist because someone decided they should, shaped not by natural law but by human purpose. A bridge, a corporation, a legal code, a curriculum, a computer program: all artificial in Simon's precise sense, made by human design for human ends, operating at the interface between what their designers intended and what the world demands. The Sciences of the Artificial rests on a single conceptual distinction that has become, in the age of
large language models, the most important distinction in the philosophy of technology. Simon distinguished between