Previous Next Up Comments SEHR, volume 4, issue 1: Bridging the
Gap Updated 8 April 1995  cognitive futility  Robert Pogue
Harrison  At a certain point in Herbert Simon's paper, which on
the whole I read as a statement about-not a demonstration of-
literature's translatibility into categories that cognitive
science can make sense of, at a certain point in this paper
subdivided into twenty one sections, each of which looks at the
literary artifact and its interpretation from a discrete
thematic perspective, at a certain point in this paper, then,
more precisely in the section entitled "Images as Meaning," and
I do believe that this is at least numerically the central point
in the paper, Simon quotes the first stanza of Wallace Stevens's
poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." It was at this
point in my reading of the paper that a very cheerless feeling
came over me, a feeling that amounted to something like despair
over the possibility of a genuine dialogue between Simon and
myself on the topic of liter