Science Quote by Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon’s definition of learning reads like a scalpel: clean, clinical, and quietly radical. He doesn’t romanticize curiosity or self-improvement; he treats learning as a measurable shift in what a system can do next time. That word, “system,” is doing heavy lifting. It flattens the usual hierarchy between human minds, organizations, and machines, placing them on the same continuum of adaptation. Coming from a scientist who helped found cognitive science and shaped early AI, the intent is clear: make learning legible enough to model, test, and eventually engineer.

The subtext is a pushback against mistaking momentary performance for genuine learning. Simon insists on “more or less permanent” change, a pragmatic hedge that nods to forgetting, noise, and context-dependence without surrendering the core claim: learning shows up as altered capacity, not just altered mood or fresh information. It’s a definition designed to survive the lab, where you need criteria, not inspiration.

“Capacity for adapting to its environment” also smuggles in an evolutionary worldview. Learning isn’t framed as internal enrichment; it’s instrumental, a strategy for coping with constraints, incentives, and uncertainty. In the mid-to-late 20th century, when behaviorism was being challenged and computation was becoming a metaphor for mind, Simon offers a bridge: learning as functional change that can be observed from the outside, whether the subject is a child, a bureaucracy, or a program. The power of the line is its cold clarity: it reframes education, intelligence, and progress as the same question - what can you now handle that you couldn’t before?