Steps toward a Kinetic Theory of Matter

Steps toward a possible theory of organization

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...

First steps toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition*

Usage-based models of language focus on the speci®c communicative events in which people learn and use language. In these models, the psycholinguistic units with which individuals operate are determined not by theoretical ®at but by observation of actual language use in actual communicative events. This data-based approach make these models especially congenial for the analysis of children's la...