Selecting a humanly understandable knowledge representation for reasoning about knowledge

✍ Scribed by Anthony S. Maida

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1985
• Weight: 621 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7373
• DOI: 10.1016/s0020-7373(85)80067-5

✦ Synopsis

Three formalisms for representing knowledge about knowledge are briefly examined from the point of view of allowing a computer program to communicate its knowledge to a human. The first two formalisms are philosophically motivated and the last is psychologically motivated. Although all three formalisms are adequate for the purposes of valid inference in this problem domain, it is argued that the psychologically motivated formalism is the most useful of the three for the purposes of man-machine communication. The first two formalisms express more distinctions than a human would, when reasoning about the same problem, whereas the last formalism express the right number of distinctions.