Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Knowledge is at the heart of intelligent behavior. The ability to obtain, manipulate, and communicate knowledge, in explicit form, is what distinguishes humans from other animals. This suggests that any study of intelligent behavior, theoretical or experimental, would have the same starting point, namely a Science of Knowledge, which studies the basic forms of knowledge, its acquisition, and its processing.Yet there does not seem to exist such a unified and mutually agreed science of knowledge. In ancient times philosophy, the ‘love of knowledge,’ would aim to fulfill this role of the Mother of all Sciences, but philosophy has since long lost its central place and has mostly fragmented into specialized sciences such as physics, biology, and mathematics. Computer science, a relatively young branch on the tree of knowledge, has some aspirations to be the science of knowledge, but is currently at best a loosely connected collection of engineering technologies and abstract mathematical theory. (In fact, scholars of more established disciplines such as physics or chemistry often hesitate to call computer science a science at all, because its design-oriented approach does not fit in well with the doctrines of experimental sciences.) Artificial intelligence-the discipline studying fruitful connections between intelligent behavior and computers–would be another contender, but has been accused ... log in or subscribe to read full text