On Herbert A. Simon and Jorge Luis Borges about Free Will

Abstract

In 1970 Herbert Simon had been invited by the Sociedad Argentina de Organización Industrial (Argentine Society of Industrial Organization, SADOI, by its initials in Spanish) to deliver some lectures on “Business Management in the Technological Era”. On this occasion, he asked for an audience with Jorge Luis Borges, who, at the time, served as Director of the Argentine National Library. Simon had read some of Borges’s stories and was particularly fascinated by La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel), wherein he discovered that Borges, like him, conceived of life as a search through a labyrinth. In fact, during the interview, the roles got reversed: in order to understand Simon’s concerns, Borges ended up asking more questions to Simon than Simon to Borges. The Spanish translation of the interview was published in Primera Plana, an Argentine journal of the time. This paper will show that this brief interview sheds light on some of Simon’s ideas about determinism and free will. His critique on maximizing rationality and his suggested approach to decision-making have contributed to enlarge the concept of rationality as construed by standard economic theory, enabling psychological and sociological dimensions to come into play. Consequently, it may be argued that Simon is incorporating free will in economics. However, though Simon’s position implies an advancement for the role of free will, the whole context of his ideas conditioned it, thus resulting in a “weak” notion of it. During the course of his conversation with Borges, Simon clarified his personal stance, which is consistent with his ideas. The paper will reveal Borges´ and Simon’s understanding of free will. This paper also contains a part of the conversation between Simon and Borges that has not been published previously in English. Although not all of it deals with free will, I believe that introducing it in its entirety is a contribution to the knowledge on Borges’ and Simon’s thought.