The frame problem arises in attempts to formalise problem--solving processes involving interactions with a complex world. It concerns the difficulty of keeping track of the consequences of the performance of an action in, or more generally of the making of some alteration to, a representation of the world. The paper contains a survey of the problem, showing how it arises in several contexts and relating it to some traditional problems in philosophical logic. In the second part of the paper several suggested partial solutions to the problem are outlined and compared. This comparison necessitates an analysis of what is meant by a representation of a robot's environment.

Operations Research, 21, 1071–1088.

In IJCAI-73, pp. 423–430.

BBN Rep. No. 2378, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

This report considers the problem of constructing an abstract model of story comprehension. The use of questions that go beyond the story as a test of understanding the story raises a methodological problem which is discussed in detail.

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Cognitive Psychology 3:552-631.

The phrase "technology and education" usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dullest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a Skinner box. The purpose of this essay is to present a grander vision of an educational system in which technology is used not in the form of machines for processing children but as something the child himself will earn to manipulate, to extend, to apply to projects, thereby gaining a greater and more articulate mastery of the world, a sense of the power of applied knowledge and a self-confidently realistic image of himself as an intellectual agent. Stated more simply, I believe with Dewey, Montessori, and Piaget that children learn by doing and by thinking about what they do. And so the fundamental ingredients of educational innovation must be better things to do and better ways to think about oneself doing these things.

The aim of this book is to advance our understanding of how humans think. It seeks to do so by putting forth a theory of human problem solving, along with a body of empirical evidence that permits assessment of the theory.

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