The life-long learning imperative … ends and means

Life-Long Learning: Individual Abilities versus Environment and Means

This paper describes new and emerging technologies in education, learning environments and methods that have to satisfy life-long learning of person, from school age to retirement, on the basis of the psycho-physiological model of the cognitive abilities formation. It covers such topics as: evaluation of a human (accounting schoolchildren, youth and adults features) abilities and individual pro...

Means-Ends Epistemology

This paper describes the cornerstones of a means-ends approach to the philosophy of inductive inference. I begin with a fallibilist ideal of convergence to the truth in the long run, or in the “limit of inquiry”. I determine which methods are optimal for attaining additional epistemic aims (notably fast and steady convergence to the truth). Means-ends vindications of (a version of) Occam’s Razo...

Means, Ends and Medical Care

Ends to a means

Most of the familiar garden birds we see all the time have a very short life: just a few years for the commoner species. But some birds have the potential for a very long life and a new study has looked at chromosomal status that may be linked with longevity. A team of international scientists headed by Pat Monahan at the University of Glasgow report, in Proceedings B of the Royal Society (publ...

Learning Hierarchical Skills from Problem Solutions Using Means-Ends Analysis

Humans acquire skills in different ways, one of which involves learning from worked-out solutions to problems. In this paper, we present an extension to the ICARUS cognitive architecture that lets it acquire complex hierarchical skills in this manner. Unlike previous work on this topic, our approach relies on an existing architectural mechanism, means-ends analysis, to explain steps in the prob...