Knowledge Representation
Pastor Brett Peterson
Class 1.1
Start at the Beginning
Acquisition of Knowledge
Telling
Reading
Showing
Thinking
Observing
Doing
Journey of Discover
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Reading and Writing
• The first means of storing knowledge was
– making signs of some sort, pictographs or
counting marking
• A Great Step Forward was
– the development of Writing and its corollary
Reading
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Writing from Ancient Times …
• proto-writing, i.e. pictographic
communication from about 25,000
B.C.
• Sumerian Tablets with writing from
3300 B.C.
• Egyptian Hieroglyphics 3100 B.C.
• 1st known alphabet Palestine 16th17th century B.C.
• Hammurabi c. 1792 B.C.
• Cretan Linear B c. 1450 B.C.
• Greek Alphabet c. 730 B.C.
• c. 2nd century B.C. paper invented in
China
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The
Emergence of Books
Rosetta Stone
From the Caves
of 25,000 B.C.
to the Gutenberg
Bible printed
c. 1454-55 A.D.
handwritten codex
scrolls of papyrus and
the books of the Torah
Gutenberg Bible
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Kinds of Reading 1
• Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in
their influential book, How to Read a Book
distinguish 4 levels of Reading:
– Basic Reading, i.e. what do the sentences say?
– Inspectional Reading, i.e. learn about the
surface of the book, systematical skimming
answering questions like:
• What is the book about?
• What is the structure of the book?
• What are its parts?
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Kinds of Reading 2
• The 2 deeper levels are reading are:
– Analytical Reading, i.e. a thorough, complete
good reading aimed preeminently on achieving
understanding. At this level the Reader goes
beyond, in Francis Bacon’s terms, tasting, the
book to chewing and digesting it.
– Syntopical Reading, i.e. comparative reading
of numerous books on the same topic with the
objective of constructing an analysis of the
subject.
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How Does This All Work?
Knowledge
Representation
books, etc.
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Some Technical Apparatus and Rules
• We will practice … or use the following terms
– Epistemic Doubt, i.e. All Truth(s) will be
considered 1) probably incomplete, 2) open for
revision (We will probably struggle with exactly
what it means to say something is TRUE!)
– Account: a term used to represent the description
of something as in “Give an ACCOUNT of …”
– Move: a term referring to a step in a rational
argument as “the next move is …”
– Systemic Agnosticism: talk about God or other
ultimate realities will be respectful and openminded
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The Hall of Heros
• Knowledge is realized in the minds of men
and women, so the History of Knowledge is
the History of Man
• Certain of these I will TERM our Patron
Saints (people the Grand PooBah thinks are
important, your mileage may differ) -- the
list will grow throughout the course
• The First Ones Are
– G. K. Chesterton, and
– Charles S. Peirce
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
born 1874 and died 1936
• Journalist, Author, Poet,
Artist …
• Apologist for Life and
Sanity
Chesterton will pop up
repeatedly with his
particular wisdom.
– Orthodoxy
– The Everlasting Man
– the Father Brown
Mysteries
– and many many more ...
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Chesterton Quotes
"The point of having an open mind, like
having an open mouth, is to close it on
something solid."
-- G. K. Chesterton
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Charles S. Peirce
September 10, 1839 to April 19, 1914
By 1936 Alfred North Whitehead would
describe America as the developing center of
worthwhile philosophy, and identify Charles
Peirce and William James as the founders of
the American renaissance. "Of these men,"
Whitehead said, "W.J. is the analogue to
Plato, and C.P. to Aristotle."
• semiotics
• existential graphs
We will hear from Pierce on
many occasions.
http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/web/peirce/life/life.htm
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The Truth
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately
agreed to by all who investigate, is what we
mean by the truth, and the object
represented in this opinion is the real.
-- Charles S. Peirce (emphasis added)
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Peirce_Charles.html
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The Fallacy of the Answer
• Questions are the reality
• It is rare that a question has only a single
answer
• Every answer must be caveated by the
baggage it carries, the unspoken and
unformulated assumptions which form its
context, its frame of reference
• Yet we implicitly teach our students to
expect the contrary
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Elementary Note taking
• How do we capture Knowledge for reuse in
the simple environment of a Lecture?
• Several Plausible Accounts
– transcription — we copy down the words like a
court stenographer and read them when we
want to “replay” the lecture (no compaction!)
– notes — we copy down the important ideas and
review those when we want to refresh our
understanding (presumably some compaction)
– others … ex. making concept maps
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The Ubiquitous Character of
STORY
• The most powerful method of conveying
knowledge is to tell a story
– Myth: see work of Joseph Campbell for example
– Parable: Who is my neighbor?
– Epic: Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey
• We are embarking on a journey which is a
story, perhaps an epic, so it may be fitting to
start with a great story teller
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Homer
believed to have been born as early as 1100
BC or as late as 750 BC
• traditional author of
the Iliad and the
Odessey
• the foundation of
education in ancient
Greece, the national
Epic or Myth used to
teach what it was to be
Greek
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Things are not always what they seem ...
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Homer, an appreciation
Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands
was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call
a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came
to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth.
A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been
unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind,
composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover
the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman
in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend;
that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody
who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact.
It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive
culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to
have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this,
which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too.
It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken
by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision.
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive
would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
-- G.K. Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man
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Science and Belief
A Visit with
Peter Hodgson
TAKE OUT YOUR NOTEBOOK
OR PAPER AND TAKE NOTES.
YOUR GOAL IS TO CAPTURE
THE MAIN IDEAS FOR
DISCUSSION
Peter Hodgson
An Electronic Guest
Peter Hodgson is a fellow of Corpus
Christi College, Oxford University,
England, where he heads the Nuclear
Physics Theoretical Group of the
Nuclear Particle Physics Lab. He has
written 10 books on nuclear physics,
300 research articles and many
popular articles on theology and
science.
http://www.catholicity.com/school/icu/c02301.htm
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Where to Begin?
• Traditional Oxford Advice — start at the
beginning, go on until you reach the end, and then
stop.
• Where is the Beginning?
– the Absolute Beginning
– the Beginning of the Universe
– the Beginning of Knowledge for each of us
• Start with the Fundamental Question
– How each individual learns?
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What Sort of Questions?
• A Dichotomy between knowledge that is
verifiable and well grounded, versus
unverifiable fancy on the other
• FACT versus FIF (Funny Internal Feelings)
• A Crucial Question: What is Fundamental?
– External Reality, i.e. Realism
– the Mind, i.e. Cartesian or Kantian positivism
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Knowing
• How we can begin to Know?
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The Epistemic Cycle
• Babies interacting with their environment
• Children are innate scientists
• the way to learn about the world is to act on
it and see what happens
• the cycle of Guessing and Checking
followed by an other cycle of Guessing and
Checking is called The Epistemic Cycle
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Must There Be Innate Ideas?
• Perhaps NOT given the Epistemic Cycle
• Almost Any Idea, however wrong, can get
the cycle started, and THEN
• Starting from a variety of wrong places it
will soon eliminate errors
• We learn by interacting with the world
– a stream of sense impressions
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The Baby Learns ...
•
•
•
•
•
Particular Objects — the rattle
other rattles, i.e. “rattles” as a Class
things that look like rattles but are not
the FORMATION of Concepts
the DEVELOPMENT of Visual Knowledge
and Language
• Voyages of Discovery and Higher and
Higher Levels of Abstraction
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The Tacit Supposition ...
• We Live in a REAL WORLD
• the success of the Epistemic Cycle is selfvalidating
• If there were no objective reality the cycle
would not work!
• SHARED IDEAS
• Scientists are Natural and Instinctive Realists
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The Steps to Knowledge
• STEP ONE — Recognition of Particular Facts
– The recognition of individual facts is but the first step in
knowledge,
• STEP TWO — the General in the Particular
– the second is the classification of facts, the recognition of the
general in the particular.
– This is a spontaneous unconscious act, a basic characteristic
of human thinking. It is not an inference from sensations; it
is the immediate grasping by the mind of a facet of reality.
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The Beginnings of Human History
• Reconstructing the Life Style of Early Man
• The caves of Lascaux, Altimira and other
sites
– Primitive Man was an ARTIST
– Primitive Man was an ASTRONOMER
– Primitive Man was both Priest and Scientist
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Early Civilization
•
•
•
•
the African Savannah
Numerous Ancient Peoples
Sumerians (Gilgamesh)
Egyptians
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The Greeks
• the Art of Asking the Right Questions
– Socrates
• Great Achievement
– the idea of Universal Causality
– study by Rational Argument
• Chaos or Teleology (Purpose)
• the One and the Many
• the Problem of Change
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Unchanging and Changing Substance
• Thales (c580 BC) — universal “stuff” is
“WATER”
• Anaximenes thought it was “AIR”
• Heraclitus thought it was “FIRE”
• Anaximander postulated four elements
–
–
–
–
EARTH (solid)
AIR (gas)
FIRE (plasma)
and WATER (liquid)
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Parmenides and Democritus
• The One and The Many
• The Problem of Change
• Parmenides — the fundamental stuff must be
unchangeable (the notion of permanent things)
• Democritus and Aristotle, two answers
– atoms moving in a void (Democritus)
– the distinction between Act and Potency
(Aristotle)
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Aristotle’s Four Causes
•
•
•
•
Material — of what is it made, its matter?
Formal — what is its form or pattern or essence?
Efficient — how does it come to be?
Final — what is its function, goal or purpose?
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Theories of Two Types
• Essentialists — giving a TRUE account of
reality
• Descriptive — consequences that AGREE
WITH EXPERIMENT
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The Cyclic Universe
• the debilitating aspects of a world where
everything has happened and will simply
happen again
• such beliefs still survive in Astrology
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Aristotle’s Teleology
• His success as a Biologist may have been
responsible for his failure as a Physicist
• For all its glories, Greek science was stillborn; it never developed into a selfsustaining enterprise.
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WORKSHOP
QUESTION: What are the
fundamental ideas presented by Peter
Hodgson in his talk?
Socrates
born 469 BC and died 399 BC
The unexamined life is not worth living -- SOCRATES
• a seeker of truth
Found guilty of corrupting the
youth of Athens, Socrates chooses • remembered for the love
to obey the law rather than escape,
Plato bore him as the hero
and drinks the hemlock.
of many of Plato’s
Dialogues
• First known practitioner
of the Socratic Method,
teaching by questioning
• We learn by recollection
of what is already known
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http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/SOCRATES.HTM
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The Character of Wisdom
to know that we do not know
He (Socrates) also questioned poets, but they could not even elucidate
their poems to his satisfaction. After one such encounter:
I reflected as I walked away, Well, I am certainly wiser than
this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any
knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something
which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my
ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to
this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not
know. -- SOCRATES
http://www.btinternet.com/~socratic/excerpt.htm
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Homework
• Read “The Meno” by Plato and be prepared
to discuss the Questions
– What is Knowledge?
– Where does Knowledge Come From?
– How Do You Know?
• Do an Inspectional Reading of Chapters 1
and 2 of Fensel’s Ontologies
• Think about what kind of PROJECT would
be right for you and prepare to share your
thoughts in the WORKSHOP
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References
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
and Charles Van Doren, ISBN 0-671-212095 Pbk (material excerpted from Chapter 2
The Levels of Reading)
• The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
• Audio Lecture from the Nature of Belief
program by Peter Hodgson
• Miscellaneous Web-sites as noted
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