[Reading] Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding, Chapter3

1. What scripts do, then, is to provide connectivity.
2. Thus, while it is possible to understand a story without using a script, scripts are an important part of story understanding. What they do is let you leave out the boring details when you are talking or writing, and fill them in when you are listening or reading.
3. Thus, a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines well-known situation. Scripts allow for new references to objects within them just as if these objects had been previously mentioned; objects within a script may take 'the' without explicit introduction because the script itself has already implecitly introduced them.

Chapter 3 is about script. Schank thinks that we understand stories based on the massive scripts stored in our minds. For example, a "restaurant script" gives us lots of information about what happens in succession within a restaurant context. Scripts are invoked by headers, which are conceptualizations of four kinds: Precondition Header (PH), Instrumental Header (IH), Locale Header (LH), and Internal Conceptualization Header (ICH).

During the reasoning process of a story, different scripts may need to be envoked because of detours or abrupt endings of scripts, such as interferences (preventing normal continutation of the script) and distractions (initiating new goals for the actors). Interferences are of two types: obstacles (missing preconditions) and errors (unexpected of inappropriate results). Another cause of envoking more than one script is that it is required for doing inference because of mixture of the situation faced (e.g. having lunch in a train's dinner car), different roles have their respective scripts, or a former situation influences the later situation's preconditions, etc. The three types of scripts include personal script, instrumental script, and situational script.

I think, we store both stories and scripts in our mind, and they exhibit different meanings to us. Scripts are sort of commonsensial knowledge that we learn about everything in the world along the way since we were born, and we use these commonsense scripts to reason all the stories or experiences new to us. These new stories may possess lots of other information than commonsential knowledge, such as one's personal traits, the effect of some particular events, or simply what some sentence means literally. Thus, if we think about Marvin's layered architecture of human mind, scripts and stories shouldn't be accessed in an identical way or by same layer(s). Should they?