ABSTRACT
Editors' Introduction In the doctoral dissertation from which this chapter is drawn, Ashwin Ram presented an alternative perspective on the processes o f story un derstanding, explanation, and learning. The issues that Ram explores in that dissertation are similar to those that are explored by the other au thors in this book, but the angle that Ram takes on these issues is some what different. Ram's exploration of these processes is organized around the central theme o f question asking. For Ram, understanding a story means identifying questions that the story raises and questions that it answers. Question asking also serves as a lens through which each o f the subprocesses is viewed: The retrieval o f stored explanations, for instance, is driven by a library o f what Ram calls "XP retrieval questionslikew ise, evaluation is driven by another set o f questions called "hypothesis verification questions."
