Two textually distinct Simon quotes on intuition-as-recognition — a 1986 McKinsey passage and a 1992 Psychological Science line — circulate and are frequently conflated

herbert-simonexpert-intuitionquote-verificationsource-disambiguationconflation-risk

At least two different Simon sentences express the same underlying idea (expertise as fast, cue-based recognition), and secondary web sources run them together as though they were one quotation from one publication:

1. The 1986 passage, attributed to The McKinsey Quarterly ("How Managers Express their Creativity," Autumn 1986): "We usually use the word 'intuition' ... to refer to this ability of experts to respond to situations in their domains of expertise almost instantaneously and relatively accurately." This is the quote underlying claim-simon-defines-expert-intuition-as-domain-bound-recognition; its sourcing status is treated in claim-simon-intuition-quote-traces-to-undigitized-1986-mckinsey-article.

2. A 1992 line, attributed by several quote-aggregation sites to Simon, H. A. (1992), "What Is an 'Explanation' of Behavior?", Psychological Science, 3(3), 150-161: "Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition," paired with "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer."

These are different sentences from (apparently) different publications, but they are frequently blended in secondary sources without distinguishing which came from which. The 1992 leg is no longer a hypothesis: as of 2026-08-30 the Psychological Science line was read verbatim from a direct primary — Carnegie Mellon's archival copy of the paper — so the two texts are confirmed genuinely distinct, not one quote misattributed to two venues (see claim-simon-1992-intuition-is-recognition-quote-confirmed-verbatim-primary). What the 1992 confirmation does not settle is the frequency half of the title's "frequently conflated" — no specific conflating carrier is named or quoted in this note (the cross-model audit below flags this traceability gap), so that circulation pattern remains an unreceipted characterization. And it does not confirm the 1986 McKinsey attribution, which stays undigitized and unlocated (claim-simon-intuition-quote-traces-to-undigitized-1986-mckinsey-article).

This is the kind of source-drift a sourcing floor exists to catch before it hardens into a vault claim — see the parallel disambiguation logic in claim-nettalk-1987-complex-systems-distinct-from-1986-report.

Correction history.

• 2026-09-05 — When written (2026-08-29) this note's 1992 leg rested only on quote-aggregator sites and carried [unverified-quote — needs direct read], and the commentary above hoped a future session could reach the 1992 primary. It has: a 2026-08-30 capture read the "Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition" line verbatim from Carnegie Mellon's archival copy of the paper. The 1992 leg is now Tier-1 anchored (capture-verified; the automated quote_check gave a false negative on the two-column layout, verbatim re-check pending the verifier bee). The body's 1992 sentence was updated to state this; the "textually distinct" core claim is unchanged, now on firmer ground. New anchor: claim-simon-1992-intuition-is-recognition-quote-confirmed-verbatim-primary. The 1986 leg and the unreceipted-conflation-frequency gap are both untouched by this.