A theory of intimate massacres: Steps toward a causal explanation

Steps toward a possible theory of organization

Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation

Despite its clarity and eloquence, Woodward’s wonderful book does not wear its virtues on its sleeve. You need the whole shirt. I aim to let those virtues show a bit more, and that requires some background to explain what Woodward has accomplished. Philosophical theories come chiefly in two flavors, Socratic and Euclidean. Socratic philosophical theories, whose paradigm is The Meno, advance an ...

Steps Toward Automatic Theory Formation

This paper describes a theory formation system which can discover a p a r t i a l axiomization of a data base represented as extensional ly defined binary r e l a t i o n s . The system f i r s t discovers a l l possible in tens ional d e f i n i t i o n s of each binary re la t i on in terms of the others. It then determines a minimal set of these re la t ions from which the others can be def ...

First Steps Toward a Computational Theory of Autism

A computational model with three interacting components for context sensitive reinforcement learning, context processing and automation can autonomously learn a focus attention and a shift attention task. The performance of the model is similar to that of normal children, and when a single parameter is changed, the performance on the two tasks approaches that of autistic children.

Some steps toward a central theory of ecosystem dynamics

Ecology is said by many to suffer for want of a central theory, such as Newton's laws of motion provide for classical mechanics or Schroedinger's wave equation provides for quantum physics. From among a plurality of contending laws to govern ecosystem behavior, the principle of increasing ascendency shows some early promise of being able to address the major questions asked of a theory of ecosy...