Schema Mechanism

"An agent learns by discovering reliable patterns: when I do X in context C, result R tends to follow."

Gary Drescher's Made-Up Minds (1991) provides a computational theory of how minds learn causal models of the world. Drescher was a student of Marvin Minsky at MIT, and his schema mechanism extends Piaget's developmental psychology into executable algorithms.

The Core Idea

A schema is a causal unit:

Context → Action → Result

The agent doesn't start with schemas. It discovers them through experience, noticing which actions reliably produce which results in which contexts.

schema:
  action: push-button