The list of Simon’s influential ideas extends much further than this, however. Arguably, Simon’s work on hierarchical structure and the near-decomposability of complex systems (1996, chapter 8) planted the seeds of modularity-based thinking, which blossomed in the work of Marr (1982), Fodor (1983), and evolutionary psychologists (Barkow et al., 1992; Pinker, 1997). In addition, Simon’s (1996) emphasis on satisficing and the bounded nature of rationality set the stage for the fascinating research programs of such varied figures as Gerd Gigerenzer (2000), Christopher Cherniak (1986), and Ron McClamrock (1995). In fact, in conjunction with Kahneman and Tversky’s heuristics and biases program (Kahneman et al., 1982), Simon’s observations about the bounded nature of rationality yielded what is now the leading view of human cognition: it’s the work of a complex but nonoptimized system that manages surprisingly well by deploying its limited resources in a context-specific way – that is, in a way that exploits a grab-bag of relatively domain-specific shortcuts that are reasonably reliable given the environments in which they’re typically employed. At the same time, Simon sometimes emphasized adaptive rationality – the idea that, under a wide range of circumstances, intelligent human behavior is, given the subject’s goals, a straightforward function of the structure of the task at hand – a theme appearing in the work of such luminaries as Dan Dennett (1987) and John Anderson (1990). Simon also articulated a vision of intelligent behavior as the product of simple, internal mechanisms interacting with a complex external environment and, in doing so, inspired nearly two generations of philosophers and cognitive scientists who take intelligence to be the by-product of, or to emerge from, bodily interaction with the environment (Clark, 1997; Brooks, 1999). In addition, Simon (1996, pp. 88, 94, 110) was perhaps the earliest working cognitive scientist explicitly to place aspects of internal processing on cognitive par with aspects of the environment external to the organism, a central theme in Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s enormously influential essay ‘The Extended Mind’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). There could scarcely be a more humbling list of one thinker’s achievements, and little has been said about Simon’s contributions to our understanding of search algorithms, economics, design, or management!

As impressive as this list is, one might nevertheless wonder whether Simon’s views can be integrated into a single overarching vision of human cognition – of its structure, workings, and relation to the environment. Motivated by this kind of concern, I focus, in what follows, on an apparent inconsistency in Simon’s thinking, one that stands out especially clearly against the backdrop of decades of accumulated empirical results in what is sometimes known as ‘embodied cognitive science’ (Varela et al., 1991; Clark, 1997, 2008b; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Rowlands, 1999; Gallagher, 2005; Gibbs, 2006; Rupert, 2006, 2009, 2011; Shapiro, 2010; Wilson and Foglia, 2011). At first blush, embodied results seem to support certain strands of Simon’s thought at the expense of others. I argue, however, that even in cases in which Simon’s pronouncements about the mind were premature or his emphasis out of balance (e.g., not sufficiently oriented toward the body-based contributions to human cognition), many of his own views about the mind provide the necessary corrective and allow him to accommodate – even anticipate – embodiment-oriented insights. Simon...