ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses psychological reality to mathematical notions such as embodiments, structures, and theories. It explains certain mathematical preliminaries for the behavioral scientist who is not familiar with mathematical foundations. The book also presents the foundations of the theory more formally and extended to deal with perception and meaning. It deals with mechanisms by which rules are put to use and how new rules are acquired under the idealized conditions specified. The book also explains mechanisms of motivation, and addresses itself to the problem of explaining and predicting what a subject will do next. It proposes a mathematization of the idealized theory, taken as a whole. The book finally adds more structure to the partial theories by introducing assumptions concerning memory and information processing.
