ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some tentative images for ‘muddling through’ that are motivated by developments in control theory and field observations of expert problem solving. Charles Lindblom offered a more heuristic program of incremental adjustment as a more realistic alternative to the classical, normative approaches to policy making. He called this heuristic, trial-and-error process: ‘muddling through.’ Gary Klein’s program to study decision making in naturalistic situations provides an alternative perspective on both adaptive control and on the nature of human decision making. Klein developed the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model to represent the processes that he observed in naturalistic decision-making contexts. The RPD model suggests that rather than comparing alternatives, people typically choose one alternative based on their assessment of the situation. There is little evidence that the larger implications of the coordination described by J. Dewey and developed more completely in the Cybernetic Hypothesis and models of Self-Organization have had much impact on computational theories of mind.
