Roger C. Schank

How are our memories, our narratives, and our intelligence interrelated? What can artificial intelligence and narratology say to each other? In this pathbreaking study by an expert on learning and computers, Roger C. Schank argues that artificial intelligence must be based on real human intelligence, which consists largely of applying old situations - and our narratives of them - to new situations in less than obvious ways. To design smart machines, Schank therefore investigated how people use narratives and stories, the nature and function of those narratives, and the connection of intelligence to both telling and listening. As Schank explains, "We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experiences because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering." This first paperback edition includes an illuminating foreword by Gary Saul Morson.

Narrative and Intelligence

Tell Me a Story

Peter G. Childers

Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions

The Creative Attitude

Robert P. Abelson

An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures

Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding

how cognitive science can save our schools

Teaching minds

Researchers in Artificial Intelligence have discovered a great deal about reading while striving to teach computers to read. This information, however, has been of small benefit in our schools since AI researchers usually have little contact with educators or researchers involved with teaching children to read. Now, a respected AI expert examines the parallels of these two areas of study. In this clear, practical volume, he demonstrates, step by step, how to use the concepts of Artificial Intelligence for more effective reading instruction.

Teaching from the Perspective of Artificial Intelligence

Reading and Understanding

From grade school to graduate school, from the poorest public institutions to the most affluent private ones, our educational system is failing students. In his provocative new book, cognitive scientist and bestselling author Roger Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction and the solution is cognitive-based learning. Teaching Mindsprovides a model for revolutionizing the very foundations of education. Using the cognitive science discoveries of recent years, Schank demonstates how teaching should be aligned with the way people think rather than with the subjects that have always been taught. He identifies 12 cognitive processes that must be mastered by all students no matter what careers they choose. He explains how teachers can act as mentors and facilitators, guiding students as they acquire experiences related to these processes. This "new" kind of learning will naturally lead to a "new" kind of teaching that will better prepare students to succeed in school and in the highly competitive global arena. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking. The time is now for schools to start teaching minds!

How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools

Teaching Minds

Fundamental Studies in Computer Science, 3: Conceptual Information Processing discusses a theory of natural language and implementation of that theory on a computer, focusing basically on an Artificial Intelligence approach to linguistics. This book aims to write computer programs that could understand and generate sentences, which is intended as a first step towards the long range goal of a computer that can communicate with people in natural language. The topics covered include computational linguistics, conceptual dependency theory, history of the analyzer, representation in memory, and structure of BABEL. This publication is a good reference for researchers and specialists working in the field of computer science.

Conceptual Information Processing

To hear politicians talk, one would think the entire purpose of school is to assess children rather than educate them. Excitement about learning doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda. The villains are those who profit from testing mania, make the tests, coach for testing, publish the books on which the tests are based, and believe that the results matter. Children are being taught things they don't need to know and nobody seems to care. Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane is a cautionary tale of the dangers of educational testing and outmoded curriculum design. Bringing a new twist to Charles Dickens' classic story, A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is recast as the head of an educational testing service. He is faced with the ghosts of Education Past, Present, and Future as well as his former mentor, John Dewey. As he observes a horrible future, he comes to understand the harm he has done and its repercussions on the school system. His time with the ghosts and John Dewey leads him to a dramatic turnaround regarding schools and scholastic teaching. It haunts him until he decides to undo the damage he has done to children all over the world.

Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane

Ellen Langer

It is not unusual for a festschrift to include offerings from several areas of study, but it is highly unusual for those areas to cross disciplinary lines. This book, in doing just that, is a testimony to Bob Abelson's impact on the disciplines of social psychology, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and the applied areas of political psychology and decision-making. The contributors demonstrate that their association with Abelson, whether as students or colleagues, has resulted in an impressive intellectual cross-fertilization.

Psycho-Logic in Honor of Bob Abelson

Beliefs, Reasoning, and Decision Making

Christopher K. Riesbeck

Alex Kass

This book is the third volume in a series that provides a hands-on perspective on the evolving theories associated with Roger Schank and his students. The primary focus of this volume is on constructing explanations. All of the chapters relate to the problem of building computer programs that can develop hypotheses about what might have caused an observed event. Because most researchers in natural language processing don't really want to work on inference, memory, and learning issues, most of their sample text fragments are chosen carefully to de-emphasize the need for non text-related reasoning. The ability to come up with hypotheses about what is really going on in a story is a hallmark of human intelligence. The biggest difference between truly intelligent readers and less intelligent ones is the extent to which the reader can go beyond merely understanding the explicit statements being communicated. Achieving a creative level of understanding means developing hypotheses about questions for which there may be no conclusively correct answer at all. The focus of the lab, during the period documented in this book, was to work on getting a computer program to do that. The volume adopts a case-based approach to the construction of explanations which suggests that the main steps in the process of explaining a given anomaly are as follows: * Retrieve an explanation that might be relevant to the anomaly. * Evaluate whether the retrieved explanation makes sense when applied to the current anomaly. * Adapt the explanation to produce a new variant that fits better if the retrieved explanation doesn't fit the anomaly perfectly.

Inside Case-Based Explanation

In the author's words: "This book is an honest attempt to understand what it means to be educated in today's world." His argument is this: No matter how important science and technology seem to industry or government or indeed to the daily life of people, as a society we believe that those educated in literature, history, and other humanities are in some way better informed, more knowing, and somehow more worthy of the descriptor "well educated." This 19th-century conception of the educated mind weighs heavily on our notions on how we educate our young. When we focus on intellectual and scholarly issues in high school as opposed to issues, such as communications, basic psychology, or child raising, we are continuing to rely on outdated notions of the educated mind that come from elitist notions of who is to be educated and what that means. To accommodate the realities of today's world it is necessary to change these elitist notions. We need to rethink what it means to be educated and begin to focus on a new conception of the very idea of education. Students need to learn how to think, not how to accomplish tasks, such as passing standardized tests and reciting rote facts. In this engaging book, Roger C. Schank sets forth the premises of his argument, cites its foundations in the Great Books themselves, and illustrates it with examples from an experimental curriculum that has been used in graduate schools and with K-12 students. Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own is essential reading for scholars and students in the learning sciences, instructional design, curriculum theory and planning, educational policy, school reform, philosophy of education, higher education, and anyone interested in what it means to be educated in today's world.

Roger C. Schank

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