Gilbert Boss

Frame-based Representation of Philosophical Systems Using a Knowledge Engineering Tool

This article addresses the methodological problem of the non-linear representation of philosophical systems in a computerized knowledge base. It is a problem of knowledge representation as defined in the field of artificial intelligence. Instead of a purely theoretical discussion of the issue, we present selected results of a practical experiment which has in itself some theoretical significance. We show how one can represent different philosophies using CODE, a knowledge engineering system developed by artificial intelligence researchers. The hypothesis is that such a computer based representation of philosophical systems can give insight into their conceptual structure. We argue that computer aided text analysis can apply knowledge representation tools and techniques developed in artificial intelligence and we estimate how philosophers as well as knowledge engineers could gain from this cross-fertilization. This paper should be considered as an experiment report on the use of knowledge representation techniques in computer aided text analysis. It is part of a much broader project on the representation of conceptual structures in an expert system. However, we intentionally avoided technical issues related to either Computer Science or History of Philosophy to focus on the benefit to enhance traditional humanistic studies with tools and methods developed in AI on the one hand and the need to develop more appropriate tools on the other.

Intelligence artificielle ou philosophie sur ordinateur

RésuméLes ordinateurs, peuvent-ils être un instrument pour faire de la philosophie? La réponse proposée par cet article développe dix moments dont les thèmes sont:— relation entre l’intelligence artificielle et la philosophie,— discours philosophiques dans les textes écrits et les ordinateurs,— limitations de la représentation du style littéraire sur ordinateur,— degré d’intelligence requis dans les programmes pour la représentation dynamique des systèmes conceptuels,— réseau sémantique,— importance de la taxinomie en philosophie,— un texte tiré de laCritique de la raison pure,— une représentation de ce texte dans un réseau sémantique «tranditionnel» (CODE),— une nouvelle langue graphique pour représenter la philosophie,— utilité d’une telle langue et utilisation des ordinateurs en philosophie.

Systems Perspective for Knowledge Representation

Knowledge representation has been associated with the development of computer systems exhibiting some degree of intelligence. However, it has been recently acknowledged that capturing knowledge about the world is also essential to systems engineering and the elicitation of the users requirements regardless of the so called “intelligence” of the system being implemented (Bordiga, Greenspan, Mylopoulos, 1985). Any system specification effort is partly a matter of deriving a world model and deciding which type of objects should be represented and which of their properties and relations are relevant, this world model represents the context within which the computer based system will operate.