ABSTRACT
The twentieth century also brought the technological means - the electronic digital computer - for manipulating large discrete-symbol structures at high speed. The theory that knowledge can and must be reducible to calculi then found its horne in AI (artificial intelligence), which attempted to apply it to practical problems. The emerging discipline of cognitive science also adopted this view of knowledge in its information processing model of cognition. The assumption that knowledge representation and processing is equivalent to the formal manipulation of discrete symbols was accepted, almost without question, until the mid-1980s, when finally its limitations, both as a technology and a model of cognition, could no longer be ignored.
