OPPORTUNISM AND LEARNING

There is a tension in the world between complexity and simplicity. On one hand, we are faced with a richness of environment and experience t hat is at times overwhelming. On the other, we seem to be able to cope and even thrive within this complexity through the use of simple scri pts, stereotypical judgements, and habitual behaviors. In order to fun ction in the world, we have idealized and simplified it in a way that makes reasoning about it more tractable. As a group and as individuals , human agents search for and create islands of simplicity and stabili ty within a sea of complexity and change. In this article, we will dis cuss an approach based on the case-based reasoning paradigm that attem pts to resolve this tension. This agency approach embraces, rather tha n avoids, this paradox of the apparent complexity of the world and the overall simplicity of our methods for dealing with it. It accomplishe s this by treating the behavior of intelligent agents as an ongoing at tempt to discover, create, and maintain the stability that is necessar y for the production of actions that satisfy our goals.