Learning is a hard word to define, because most definitions are too broad. "The problem is that we use the single word `learning' to cover too diverse a society of ideas."
In the preceding Block-Arch example, there were at least 4 different ways to learn: Uniframing (combining several descriptions into one), Accumulating (collecting incompatible descriptions), Reformulating (modifying a description's character), and Trans-framing (bridging between structures and functions). (NB: These are all in the cast of this chapter!)
Minsky want to introduce a new vocabulary concerning learning, because with respect to psychology, ideas from AI are new and deserve new names. "Our Block-Arch scenario is based on a computer program developed by Patrick Winston in 1970. Winston's program required an external teacher to provide the exmaples and to say which of them were arches and which were not. In my unprogrammed version of this, the teacher has been replaced by the concern of some agency inside the child to account for the emergence of that mysterious Hand-Change phenomenon." In other words, motivation to learn is important.
(NB:Again, here, mysteries mount -- instead of talking about societies of agents, we are talking about societies of ideas. Is this the terminology that is used when agents are viewed as representing mental content? Or are societies of ideas qualitatively distinct from societies of agents? And on a different not, Minsky here is making a strong move towards unsupervised learning.)
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