Qualitative reasoning and complex symbol processing

This paper presents an operational definition of the concept of qualitative reasoning and some key methodological features which can help us to implement it in some business management situations. We show that we can model any qualitative reasoning process as the behavior of an ordinal and teleological symbol processing system. Then, we present two laws of qualitative structure for symbol systems, formulated by A. Newel and H.A. Simon: “the Principle of General Intelligent Action” and the “Heuristic Search Hypothesis”. Finally, we briefly illustrate this theory with some examples of modeling business organizations.