Qualitative mathematical reasoning
Elisha P. Sacks · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1985
Qualitative analysis is the study of abstract causal reasoning. It explores the mechanisms whereby humans analyze complex systems abstractly, while ignoring unimportant and unknown low-level details. Previous research has focused on qualitative simulation techniques, analogous to numerical simulation, that use local information about a system to predict its short-term behavior. This thesis presents a new, calculus based, type of qualitative analysis, called qualitative mathematical reasoning. It derives functional descriptions of systems and uses them to predict global behavior.