ABSTRACT
This book reflects a convergence of interests at the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence. What is the nature of knowledge and how is this knowledge used? These questions lie at the core of both psychology and artificial intelligence. The psychologist who studies ‘knowledge systems’ wants to know how concepts are structured in the human mind, how such concepts develop, and how they are used in understanding and behavior. The artificial intelligence researcher wants to know how to program a computer so that it can understand and interact with the outside world. The two orientations intersect when the psychologist and the computer scientist agree that the best way to approach the problem of building an intelligent machine is to emulate the human conceptual mechanisms that deal with language. There is no way to develop adequate computer ‘understanding’ without providing the computer with extensive knowledge of the particular world with which it must deal. Mechanistic approaches based on tight logical systems are inadequate when extended to real-world tasks. The real world is messy and often illogical. Therefore artificial intelligence (henceforth Al) has had to leave such approaches behind and become much more psychological (cf. Schank and Colby, 1973; Bobrow and Collins, 1975; Boden, 1976). At the same time, researchers in psychology have found it helpful to view people as ‘information processors’ actively trying to extract sense from the continual flow of information in the complicated world around them. Thus psychologists have become more interested in machine models of real-world knowledge systems. The name ‘cognitive science’ has been used to refer to this convergence of interests in psychology and artificial intelligence (Collins, 1976).
