Faith & Spirit Quote by Herbert Simon

Simon is needling a certain kind of mathematical smugness: the idea that if your reasoning is formally correct, you have somehow captured reality. Calling correct reasoning a "grand system of tautologies" is a deliberately deflating move. In formal logic, valid inference doesn’t manufacture new truth; it preserves what was already packed into the premises. If you start with airtight assumptions, you can derive conclusions with pristine certainty - but the certainty is purchased by front-loading the world into those assumptions.

The bite lands in the second clause. "Only God can make direct use of that fact" frames omniscience as the only vantage point from which pure deduction is enough. A deity could know the complete set of true premises, the full specification of the world, and then let tautological machinery run. Humans can’t. We don’t get axioms from heaven; we get noisy data, partial models, and incentives to pretend our starting points were inevitable.

That’s classic Simon: a scientist of bounded rationality reminding us that intelligence is less about flawless inference than about coping with limits. The cultural subtext is an argument against the fantasy of total optimization - in economics, in AI, in management. Deduction is powerful inside a model; the hard part is choosing the model, deciding what to ignore, and updating when the ignored parts bite back. Simon’s line quietly swaps philosophical triumphalism for engineering humility: reasoning isn’t a pipeline to truth, it’s a tool constrained by ignorance.