We are designing computer programs for Interactive Drama, where the audience can act to modify the story while the computer responds to these acts and maintains the narrative nature of the experience. Such computer based Interactive Drama requires narrative models able to both simulate the narrative on a deep level, and allow the user to interact with it. We discuss in this paper the extent to ...

This paper explores the semiotic status of algebraic variables. To do that we build on a structuralist and post-structuralist train of thought going from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss to Baudrillard and Derrida. We import these authors’ semiotic thinking from the register of indigenous concepts (such as mana), and apply it to the register of algebra via a concrete case study of generating functions. T...

Fuzzy Logic, Computing with words, and the Computational Theory of Preceptions build a stack of methodologies to help bridge the gap between systems and phenomena in reality and scientific theories. Bridging this gap has been a problem in all philosophical approaches, and the so-called structuralist view of theories in one that was established in the 20 century. In this paper we present a “fuzz...

The postwar era showed us that we knew much less about employment determination than we thought. In this country, I remember, economists estimated in the mid-1950's that unemployment could fall to 4.5 percent or less without bringing an inflation problem. Later, it took an unemployment rate around 5 percent to keep inflation stable, as 1964 and 1973 illustrated. By the mid-1980's, it apparently...

Recent discussions of structuralist approaches to scientific theories have stemmed primarily from Worrall’s (1989), in which he defends a position (since characterized