RRE 2001/06: [RRE]Hierarchy and History in Simon's "Archit 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.