The Sciences of the Artificial

we can often predict behavior from knowledge of the system’s goals and its outer environment, with only minimal assumptions about the inner environment.

We might question whether the forms of reasoning that are appropriate to natural science are suitable also for design.

The claims of monetarists, and especially of the “rational expectations” theorists, that government is helpless to influence employment levels by using the standard Keynesian tools of monetary and fiscal policy and that attempts to reduce unemployment can only cause inflation, are based on the assumption that public responses to these measures will

Unified Theories of Cognition,

The real subjects of the new intellectual free trade among the many cultures are our own thought processes, our processes of judging, deciding, choosing, and creating. We are importing and exporting from one intellectual discipline to another ideas about how a serially organized information-processing system like a human being—or a computer, or a c

The adaptiveness of the human organism, the facility with which it acquires new representations and strategies and becomes adept in dealing with highly specialized environments, makes it an elusive and fascinating target of our scientific inquiries—and the very prototype of the artificial.

Fulfillment of purpose or adaptation to a goal involves a relation among three terms: the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment in which the artifact performs.

We should expect, therefore, that processes very similar to those employed in learning systems can be used to construct systems that discover new knowledge.

The demonstration will become more convincing when one of these systems discovers something of interest that is novel not only to it but to the world.