Abstract

The year 1943 is customarily considered as the birth of cybernetics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was officially born thirteen years later, in 1956. This chapter is about two theories on human cognitive processes developed in the context of cybernetics and early AI. The first theory is that of the cyberneticist Donald MacKay, in the framework of an original version of self-organizing systems; the second is that of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (initially with the decisive support of Clifford Shaw) and is known as information-processing psychology (IPP). The latter represents the human-oriented tendency of early AI, in which the three authors were pioneers. I shall not discuss this topic with the intention, common in this type of reconstruction, of seeking contrasts between opposing paradigms (classical AI vs. cybernetics, symbolic vs. subsymbolic, symbolic vs. situated, and so forth). Randall Beer, referring to one of these battles, the ‘‘battle between computational and dynamical ideologies,’’ decried the fact that the subjects usually examined are not ‘‘experimentally testable predictions, but rather competing intuitions about the sort of theoretical framework that will ultimately be successful in explaining cognition.’’ He concluded, ‘‘the careful study of concrete examples is more likely to clarify the key issues than abstract debate over formal definitions’’. I believe this is a conclusion that should be endorsed.