[RRE]Hierarchy and History in Simon's "Architecture of Complexity"

From: Phil Agre (pagreat_private)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 23:16:24 PDT

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    [This is a draft paper for a collection about the late Herbert Simon's
    1968 lectures on "The Sciences of the Artificial".  It uses some fine
    details of Simon's argument in the last of these lectures as points
    of departure for thinking about the historical conditions under
    which intellectual problems become visible.  It's not quite done, but
    perhaps it's of some use.]
    
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      Hierarchy and History in Simon's "Architecture of Complexity"
    
      Philip E. Agre
      Department of Information Studies
      University of California, Los Angeles
      Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
      USA
    
      pagreat_private
      http://dlis.gseis.ucal.edu/pagre/
    
      This is a draft.  Please do not quote or cite.
      Version of 4 June 2001.
    
      Italics are marked with *asterisks*, titles in the text with
      _underscores_.
    
      4700 words.
    
    
    //1 Hierarchy and general systems
    
    Herb Simon came to artificial intelligence from organizational studies
    in New Deal-era public administration, and only now, it seems, after
    Simon's sad passing in early 2001, are we in position to place this
    development in historical context.  His dissertation, published
    in 1947 after wartime delays as _Administrative Behavior_, remains
    a landmark in the empirical study of organizations.  Departing
    from the prescriptive tradition that preceded it, _Administrative
    Behavior_ looked beneath the official representations to discover
    the complementarity between human cognition and institutional context.
    Although he was a liberal Democrat and active in political causes,
    Simon did not frame his research on public organizations as a
    political project [1].  Yet in bringing empirical evidence to the
    study of organizational rationality, he was contending with the
    central political questions of his times.
    
    It was his successive attempts to formalize the limitedly rational
    processes of organizational decision-making that led Simon, together
    with Allen Newell and other colleagues, to found the field of
    artificial intelligence in the 1960's [2].  The interaction between
    individual cognition and organizational structure that had been
    central to the argument of _Administrative Behavior_ fell away
    in Newell and Simon's attempts to build computational models of
    individual problem-solving.  But themes of structure remained
    central to the project in another way, in the day-to-day technical
    work of model-building [3].  The early problem-solving models were
    extraordinary innovations in the context of their times, since they
    required the modelers to invent much of what we now take for granted
    as computer science.
    
    Simon's epochal 1968 lecture on "The Architecture of Complexity"
    (published in 1969) attempted to draw together what he had learned
    about the structure of complex systems, and we can look at this
    lecture now with thirty years of hindsight as a study in the
    historical conditions under which intellectual problems become
    visible.  Much as the early work of the cognitivist movement had been
    framed as a response to the hegemony of behaviorism, "The Architecture
    of Complexity" is framed as a response to general systems theory.  It
    was a complex response that operated on two levels.
    
    On a substantive level, general systems theory promised to explain the
    vast and rather nebulous phenomenon of "complexity" in terms of the
    order that "emerges" from a dynamical system of interacting elements.
    Simon likewise proposed to explain the phenomena of emergent
    complexity, but despite his friendly tone the unifying theme of his
    explanation -- hierarchical structure -- conflicted with the spirit of
    general systems theory.  The theme of hierarchy is *capable* of being
    compatible with general systems theory, for example in theories that
    describe hierarchies of servomechanisms, each maintaining a dynamic
    equilibrium that interacts with those above and below it.  Indeed,
    Simon had been strongly influenced by such models; he gave particular
    credit to the work of Richard Goodwin (Simon 1991: [x]).  But for the
    Simon of "The Architecture of Complexity", hierarchy meant a static
    hierarchical *structure*.  He was most interested in this structure's
    genesis (as we will see), but not in the structure's moment-to-moment
    reproduction [4].  This conception of hierarchical structure was
    obviously already a familiar theme in the study of organizations,
    but even more important for the emergence of artificial intelligence
    was the influence of Chomsky's (1957) theory of the hierarchical
    structures of natural language syntax.  What is more, themes of
    hierarchy arose naturally from Newell and Simon's practical experience
    with computational system-building.  Simon had every reason to regard
    hierarchy as a organizing theme for a science of complexity.
    
    This, perhaps, is why Simon found general systems theory so congenial
    on the level of methodology.  General systems theory was "general"
    in the sense that it promised to explain phenomena in an extremely
    wide range of fields.  To this end, it developed a vocabulary that
    can fairly be called "vague".  What, after all, is a "system"?  The
    term can be given any number of mathematical definitions, but in its
    reference to the world of empirical phenomena its great value was
    precisely its ability to direct attention in an organized way to the
    phenomena in any field.  Once a "system" has been discerned within the
    materials of a particular discipline, one can set about paraphrasing
    them in terms of an idealized mathematical theory, most especially
    that of cybernetics (see Bowker 1993).  This kind of generality need
    not be a bad thing; many heuristic devices are valuable despite their
    lack of analytical precision.  Nonetheless, the great danger of this
    procedure is that, having discovered "systems" everywhere, vagueness
    can be mistaken for universality.  The illusion of universality can
    then lead researchers to overgeneralize, and to foreclose intellectual
    alternatives.
    
    Just as the general systems theorists were impressed by their ability
    to discern "systems" wherever they looked, Simon had been struck by
    the recurrence within his own work of themes of hierarchy.  Having
    then set about looking for hierarchy in the world, he found it
    everywhere.  And so, in "The Architecture of Complexity", he proposed
    it as a universal principle of the structure of complex things.
    The conflict between general systems theory and "The Architecture
    of Complexity" is a conflict between explanatory schemas --
    self-organization and hierarchy -- that are intrinsically vague, but
    precisely for that reason can seem universal.  Now, it is entirely
    possible that one of these competing schemata really is the more
    powerful, the most heuristically valuable, the more widespread.  But
    because Simon's text deemphasizes the conflict between his own theory
    and the general systems theorists', the issue is not fully joined.
    By juxtaposing the two schemata here, I want to forestall judgements
    of universality and ask what is really at stake in choosing one rather
    than the other.
    
    Simon provides many examples of hierarchy [5].  He mentions
    organizations (1969: 87), of course, while emphasizing that hierarchy
    need not imply top-down relations of authority (88).  The basic
    structure of matter is hierarchical, in that molecules are made of
    atoms, which are themselves made of putatively elementary particles
    (87).  Astronomers can treat stars or galaxies as elementary units
    (87).  Books are divided into chapters, and then into sections,
    paragraphs, clauses, phrases, and words (90).  The case of music is
    similar (90).  The segmentary structures of societies -- individuals
    within families within tribes within nations -- are likewise
    hierarchical (88).  And problems can be solved more easily when they
    can be decomposed into subproblems whose solutions can be combined
    into a solution to the problem as a whole (95-96).
    
    Even though his overall topic was the "sciences of the artificial",
    Simon wanted to emphasize above all that hierarchy was something
    profoundly natural.  He viewed hierarchy as a general principle of
    complex structures -- and not just of *particular* complex structures
    but of complexity in general.  Hierarchy, he argued, emerges almost
    inevitably through a wide variety of evolutionary processes, for the
    simple reason that hierarchical structures are stable.  To motivate
    this deep idea, he offered (1969: 90-92) his most important example
    of hierarchy, a "parable" about imaginary watchmakers named Hora
    and Tempus.  According to this story, both watchmakers were equally
    skilled, but only one of them, Hora, prospered.  The difference
    between them lay in the design of their watches.  Each design involved
    1000 elementary components, but the similarity ended there.  Tempus'
    watches were not hierarchical; they were assembled one component at a
    time.  Hora's watches, by contrast, were organized into hierarchical
    subassemblies whose "span" was ten [6]: he would combine ten
    elementary components into small subassemblies, and then he would
    combine ten subassemblies into larger subassemblies, and these in turn
    could be combined to make a complete watch.
    
    The difference between the two watchmakers' designs became crucial in
    the larger context of their lives as artisans.  Customers would call
    them on the phone, and when the phone rang they would be compelled
    to abandon their current assembly, which would fall apart.  These
    interruptions did not bother Hora, who lost at most ten units of work:
    whatever subassembly he happened to be working on.  Tempus, however,
    would lose (on average) much more: an entire partly-assembled watch
    would fall apart, and not into modular subassemblies but back into
    its elementary components.  If interruptions are at all common, it can
    easily be shown that Hora will complete many more watches than Tempus,
    whose business will surely fail to prosper.
    
    The watchmakers' story deserves close attention.  It is striking,
    first of all, that Simon chooses to illustrate a story about evolution
    using an example that involves designers -- and watchmakers, no less
    [7].  The whole point of biological evolution is that it does not
    require a designer, and the watchmaker was a common post-Newtonian
    metaphor for God in a mechanistic universe [8].  Of course, Simon
    means to use the word "evolution" in a generalized way; he is not
    referring solely to Darwin's theory.  Nonetheless, it is worth asking
    how far the story does generalize.  His point, first of all, cannot be
    that naturally occurring complexity comes about entirely by assembling
    previously existing modular components.  Some modularity is certainly
    found in complex organisms, for example in the cell as a modular
    component of plants and animals (Simon 1969: 88), but very little
    biological structure above the cellular level is assembled from
    previously independent modular components [9].  The hierarchical
    structure of a book consists of preexisting components on some levels
    (letters, words, some of the phrases), but not on others (the great
    majority of sentences and paragraphs, and except for anthologies all
    of the sections and chapters).  Nor did the modern corporation acquire
    most of its hierarchical structure by assembling existing components;
    rather, its leaders discovered through trial and error the need to
    impose such structures upon it (Chandler 1962).  Simon (1969: 93) does
    make clear that "in spite of the overtones of the watchmaker parable,
    the theory assumes no teleological mechanism".  "Direction", he
    asserts, is provided by "nothing more than survival of the fittest
    -- that is, of the stable" (ibid).  But the equation between fitness
    and stability is forced: fitness in real ecosystems is vastly more
    than a matter of not falling to pieces.  The figure of the watchmaker
    functions (no doubt unintentionally) to make the equation between
    fitness and stability more plausible than it really is.
    
    The role of the designer in the watchmakers' story is peculiar for
    another reason.  In introducing his engagement with general systems
    theory, Simon remarks that:
    
      In [complex] systems, the whole is more than the sum of its
      parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important
      pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the
      laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the
      properties of the whole.  In the face of complexity, an in-principle
      reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist (1969: 68).
    
    He is saying two things here.  Less problematically (though
    controversially at the time), he is affirming that hierarchy allows a
    theorist to choose a level of explanation, for example treating atoms
    as if they really were atomic.  But beyond that, he also embraces
    the systems theorists' assertion that the properties of wholes cannot
    easily be predicted from the properties of their parts.  Yet this
    is nearly the opposite of the way that engineers such as Hora -- or
    Simon himself -- use hierarchy in practice.  For working engineers,
    hierarchy is not mainly a guarantee that subassemblies will remain
    intact when the phone rings.  Rather, hierarchy simplifies the process
    of design cognitively by allowing the functional role of subassemblies
    to be articulated in a meaningful way in terms of their contribution
    to the function of the whole.  Hierarchy allows subassemblies to be
    modified somewhat independently of one another, and it enables them
    to be assembled into new and potentially unexpected configurations
    when the need arises.  A system whose overall functioning cannot be
    predicted from the functionality of its components is not generally
    considered to be well-engineered.
    
    Other anomalies arise when the watchmakers' example is compared to the
    example of organizations.  Both are hierarchical.  But a watch, like
    a molecule, is hierarchical in a particular way: assemblies physically
    contain subassemblies, and in this way the hierarchy is arranged in
    space.  Elementary components that are far apart in terms of the graph
    structure of parts and subparts are typically far apart in spatial
    terms as well; in any event they are likely to be far apart in
    causal terms [10].  Simon captures this intuition with his concept
    of "nearly-decomposable systems" (1969: 99-103).  Yet his argument
    is unstable here.  He is not simply choosing to study certain
    complex structures that happen to be nearly decomposable; rather,
    he is arguing that the structures that arise in the world tend to
    be hierarchical (and thus nearly decomposable).  This is precisely
    what makes the argument profound: it is not simply a prescription
    for engineers but a sweeping empirical claim that the universe
    in general is organized *as if* it had been engineered.  But in
    order for the story about hierarchy-through-evolution to apply to
    human organizations, hierarchy must be highly adaptive for those
    organizations, and not just a transient accommodation to technological
    limits.  Chandler's (1962) history makes clear that functionally
    differentiated organizational hierarchy in the corporation arose in
    large part from the need for clear lines of authority.  But little
    follows from this: clear lines of authority might be necessary
    precisely because of the limitations of organizational technologies.
    Organizational hierarchy is not well-reputed nowadays; in any event,
    the case for hierarchy is not closed.
    
    What can be learned from these puzzles?  The lesson is surely not that
    hierarchy is a useless idea, or that hierarchies are not prevalent
    in many parts of the natural and social worlds.  The point, rather,
    is that hierarchy is a somewhat more diverse phenomenon than the
    universal ambitions of Simon's theory require.  It is understandable
    that Simon should want to idealize away some of this diversity; after
    all, he had genuinely made important discoveries about the role of
    hierarchy in the operation of complex organizations and the design
    of complex artefacts.  Nonetheless, to place Simon's discoveries
    in context, it is important that we back away from some of his
    idealizations.
    
    //2 Hierarchy in history
    
    How, then, can Simon's arguments be understood in their historical
    context?  I believe that Simon's theory was very much a product of its
    time.  The year that he wrote "The Architecture of Complexity" (1968)
    might be seen in retrospect as the high-water mark of the classical
    hierarchical organization.  The late 19th century had established the
    transportation and communication infrastructures that made possible
    the economies of scale that paid for engineers and other professional
    information workers (Chandler 1977).  Engineers had then invented the
    techniques of managerial rationalization, whereupon the "human" side
    of management had been discovered as an object of empirical study by
    Simon himself and codified prescriptively by Barnard (1962 [1938])
    and Drucker (1945).  The Cold War, finally, had given the hierarchical
    organization a new cultural role, as well as providing the research
    funds to develop scientific and computational theories of it.
    
    At the same time, many developments that we now take for granted
    were largely unimagined when Simon wrote.  Computer networking
    hardly existed, the ARPANET having first been developed around the
    time when Simon was writing.  The collapse of communism was literally
    unimaginable, and so was the collapse in cultural respect for
    hierarchy that accompanied it.  In 1969, organizations could still
    be conceptualized as stably self-contained organisms whose components
    did diverse things.  Managers still served largely as conduits for
    information, managerial accounting was poorly developed, outsourcing
    was not practical in most areas, business cycles were severe, and
    large inventories compensated for poor communications along supply
    chains.
    
    Simon identified some of the problems and articulated the themes
    that could become visible in this historical context.  In terms
    of the conflict of explanatory schemas that I identified earlier --
    self-organization versus hierarchy -- Simon caught sight of the schema
    that was ascendant in the time and place where he worked.  Research
    on emergent complexity in dynamic systems was certainly current in
    the 1960's, but it did not have the mathematical or computational
    resources to generate a research program of the same breadth.  Just as
    Minsky and Papert's _Perceptrons_ (1969) had the effect (intentionally
    or not) of aborting the research program of emergent complexity in
    neural networks, "The Architecture of Complexity" effectively captured
    the theme of complexity and bound it to a research program centered
    on conceptions of hierarchical structure.  The 1960s made hierarchy
    easy to think, and the central role of hierarchy in the era's thinking
    about computation was part of that larger trend.
    
    The point is not that Simon and his allies were consciously or
    programmatically promoting hierarchical structures of authority
    in society.  Indeed, many of them, especially the anarchist Chomsky,
    would certainly have rejected the thought.  The point, rather, is that
    the patterns that Simon discerned became visible within the larger
    context of the times.  If we wish to retreat from Simon's commitment
    to themes of hierarchy, the remedy is not an equally thoroughgoing
    commitment to the theme of self-organizing dynamic systems, much
    less the idealized market model with which dynamic systems are
    now culturally associated.  And even though Simon (1997) late in
    life explicitly endorsed organizations over markets as explanatory
    units for economics, it would be anachronistic to impute to him
    an ideological project of making state control of the economy into
    an ontological principle of the universe.  The ideological equation
    between hierarchy and government, and between dynamic systems and
    markets, was not well-developed in the era of "The Architecture of
    Complexity", and the idea of a world-historical conflict between
    hierarchies and markets (as, for example, in Fukuyama (1999)) would
    have made little sense in the context of the large corporation and
    the Cold War.  Hierarchy in those days meant not only the government
    but the church and the military, as well as the corporate firm.
    Nor is the opposite extreme of emergent self-organization ex nihilo
    any more viable intellectually; indeed, the whole point of the
    most intellectually serious proponents of self-organization, such
    as Hayek (1948), is that the libertarian economy requires a robust
    institutional framework before the miracles of self-organized
    complexity can reliably occur.
    
    To understand the place of the hierarchy and self-organization
    schemata in historical context, then, it helps to see them not only
    as warring enemies but as loosely articulated constituents of a
    single formation -- as two sides of a very old coin.  Cultural fashion
    swings back and forth between the two sides of the coin historically,
    both because of changes in reality (such as the development of the
    hierarchical capitalist firm) and because of changes in ideology (such
    as with the fall of communism).  But if we back away from questions
    of fashion and focus, we can see in historical context the profound
    complementarity of the two schemata, as well as the genuine complexity
    that each schema attempts to paper over.
    
    Simon was hardly the first scholar to notice hierarchy in all things;
    as Lovejoy (1936) long ago observed, hierarchy was a pervasive
    intellectual and cultural theme of medieval Europe.  Panofsky (1957)
    demonstrated the influence of hierarchy in medieval architecture.
    Studies such as these have described the medieval mind as living in
    a static universe.  Yet, as more recent scholarship has demonstrated,
    late-medieval experience of the market led to counterphilosophies of
    dynamism.  Kaye (1998), for example, argues that the philosophers of
    14th century Oxford and Paris were immersed in the emerging market
    societies of that era -- in their roles as university administrators
    they effectively ran large businesses -- and that this experience was
    reflected in a new intellectual picture of the universe as a dynamic
    equilibrium.  The connection between economics and cosmology was never
    made explicit in their writing, but they were certainly familiar with
    such "modern" ideas as the evils of government intervention in the
    dynamic equilibration processes of the market.  What is more, they
    applied their incipient mathematical analysis of dynamic equilibrium
    systematically to every question they could think of, including
    theological questions that no later scholar would imagine treating in
    that way.
    
    For Kaye, this significance of this discovery is that the decline of
    the static medieval worldview must be dated at least two centuries
    earlier than earlier scholars had assumed.  Yet this picture of
    decline does not match the historical facts.  Writing in the late
    18th century, Edmund Burke founded modern conservatism by convening
    an ideological coalition between the aristocracy and church --
    traditional social elites who wished to conserve a static social
    order of deference and authority -- and the emergent merchant class --
    who wished to encourage a dynamic social order of commerce.  Burke's
    project was not universally embraced in its day -- far from it.  But
    it has not disappeared, and it is currently the ascendent political
    movement in the United States.  Like any coalition, the conservative
    coalition is not entirely stable.  The interface between the dynamic
    and static components of its ideology must be constantly reworked
    and constantly smoothed over.  Some of Burke's followers emphasize
    his themes of liberty; others his themes of order; and sometimes
    the themes are combined in ways that downplay their intrinsic tension.
    In any event, the point is that the explanatory schemata of hierarchy
    and self-organization are always not at war.  Their relationship
    is complex and variable.  Both schemata are woven throughout Western
    culture, and both are capable of coming to the surface in a wide
    variety of ways when conditions are right.
    
    As an example, consider Coase's (1937) influential paper about "the
    nature of the firm".  Coase asks a striking question: if markets are
    the most efficient way to organize economic life, and if competition
    selects for efficiency, why do capitalist firms exist at all?  Why is
    the entire economy not organized according to Adam Smith's idealized
    picture of individual artisans?  The answer, Coase argues, is that
    market mechanisms are not costless, and that organizations arise when
    productive activities can be organized more cheaply by a hierarchical
    organization than by market transactions.  Coase's argument had
    little impact at first, but beginning in the 1970s, a movement arose
    of conservative legal scholars who viewed social progress in almost
    teleological terms as the progressive reduction of transaction costs,
    and thus (they argued) the ever more perfect approximation of ideal
    market conditions (Posner 1972).
    
    But this conclusion does not follow from Coase's argument.  The whole
    burden of Coase's paper, after all, was not to argue that transaction
    costs tend to disappear, but that they exist at all, and that they
    have structural consequences for the economy.  Technologies such as
    the telegraph or the Internet that reduce transaction costs do not,
    by Coase's argument, necessarily reduce the size of organizations.
    Although Coase does not use these terms, he argues that the balance
    between organizations and markets its determined by the relationship
    between transaction costs (the costs of coordinating activity in the
    market) and organizing costs (the costs of coordinating activity in
    the firm).  New technologies typically reduce both types of costs, and
    North and Wallis (1994: 613) observe that "the firm is not concerned
    with minimizing either transaction or transformation costs in
    isolation: the firm wants to minimize the total costs of producing and
    selling a given level of output with a given set of characteristics".
    
    My suggestion, then, is that phenomena of hierarchy and self-
    organization are not mutually exclusive, and that neither one is
    necessarily destined to win a world-historical battle against the
    other.  Although they are analytically distinct and should not be
    conflated, they nonetheless coexist, in both ideology and in reality,
    and they are likely to continue coexisting in the future.  From this
    perspective, the models of Simon and the general systems theorists --
    all hierarchy or all self-organization -- are models of simplicity,
    not of complexity.  Real complexity begins with the shifting relations
    between the two sides.
    
    Take, for example, the impact of computer networking on corporate
    organization since perhaps 1990.  Phenomena such as delayering (the
    cutting-out of excessive layers of hierarchical organization) and
    outsourcing (buying from others every product and service that the
    organization has not specialized in making) have been attributed in
    part to the greatly enhanced capacities for relationship-at-a-distance
    that computer networking affords.  Precisely because Simon's image of
    hierarchy is spatial, it does not fit well with the networked world,
    which collapses many types of distance.  Organizations are not in fact
    nearly-decomposable: there is much to be gained by integrating the
    activities in the different functional divisions.  The loss of clear
    lines of authority compels the organization's members to negotiate
    conflicting loyalties (Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992), but pervasive
    computer networking greatly strengthens the tools of managerial
    control and long-distance coordination.  These phenomena deconstruct
    both models -- hierarchy and self-organization alike.  Hierarchy and
    self-organization both have their place in the networked world, but it
    is a different place, and a complicated one.
    
    //3 Hierarchy and democracy
    
    What does this have to do with cognitive modeling?  Let us recall
    the great insight of Simon's dissertation: the complex fit between
    individual cognition and its institutional environment.  Simon
    wrestled with the foremost theme of his century, the place of
    rationalism in the complex relationship between the organizing
    principles of hierarchy and self-organization.  The self-organization
    model teaches the value of a groundwork of rules to facilitate
    self-ordering, and the hierarchy model the value of structures that
    simplify cognition and life in general.  Bringing these insights
    together, we see the need for a theory of cognition as a phenomenon
    of social life, embedded in institutions and relationships.  Research
    in the tradition that Simon founded has returned to the computational
    study of organizations, and thus of individuals in organizational
    context (e.g., Carley and Prietula 1994).  The permanent tensions
    between hierarchy and self-organization will surely emerge in this
    work in new and productive forms.
    
    Yet there is life beyond the collision between hierarchies and
    markets, and it lies in the values of democracy that Simon believed
    in.  By initiating the empirical study of organizations, Simon
    discovered the living, breathing human actors who lie at their
    center.  He saw something profound, that human agency and relationship
    are the ground of all social order, no matter how imputedly rational
    that order might be, and that human agency and relationship are
    reciprocally dependent on social order as well.  Democracy requires
    hierarchies and markets, but more fundamentally it requires active
    citizens who can take up a vantage point outside those institutions,
    critically evaluating them and cooperatively participating in the
    processes of social choice that shape them.  By retracing Simon's
    steps, we can learn something more about where this vantage point is
    located, and how to live in it.  I did not always agree with Simon
    [11], but like all of us I am privileged to have learned about these
    things from him.
    
    //* Endnotes
    
    [1] In this, Simon contrasts with the more recent work of his
    once-collaborator James March.
    
    [2] See Newell, Shaw, and Simon (1960); Newell and Simon (1963);
    Newell and Simon (1972).
    
    [3] Edwards (1996: 250) rightly emphasizes this point.
    
    [4] For example, it is useful to contrast Simon's conception of
    structure with the autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela (1980).
    
    [5] He also acknowledges (1969: 94) that not all structures are
    hierarchical, giving the example of polymers, which are long chains
    of identical units.  "However", he says, "for present purposes we can
    simply regard such a structure as a hierarchy with a span of one --
    the limiting case".
    
    [6] The "span" of a hierarchy is the number of subordinates beneath
    each element.
    
    [7] Dawkins (1986) later played with this image when he referred to
    evolution as "the blind watchmaker".
    
    [8] On the long Western tradition of likening the engineer to God,
    see Noble (1997).  On the clockwork metaphor see McReynolds (1980).
    
    [9] To be sure, Margulis (1998) has subsequently argued that the
    cell's internal structure arose through the symbiotic combination
    of formerly independent organisms.  In this case Simon's theory does
    apply.
    
    [10] Simon (1969: 89-90) makes clear that hierarchies are defined in
    terms of interaction patterns, not spatial proximity.  The point here
    is that the *metaphor* of hierarchy as a physical structure is
    spatial.
    
    [11] See Vera and Simon (1993) and Agre (1993; 1995; 1997: 54-57,
    142-143).
    
    //* References
    
    Philip E. Agre, The symbolic worldview: Reply to Vera and Simon,
    Cognitive Science 17(1), 1993, pages 61-69.
    
    Philip E. Agre, The soul gained and lost: Artificial intelligence as
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    end
    



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