Report 80 01 The Representation Hypothesis . ur 4IP Stanford Barr Jan 1980

This talk is about "knowledge representation," particularly some of the fundamental assumptions in' olved in the way we handle knowledge in current Al and cognitive science research. The whole enterprise seems to have at-.'andoned Namely, we have a:7ccd to assume that knowledge is something that can be represelted--that knowing something means having a data structure stored away that stands for what is known. In other words, we treat knowledge as an object, a representable object. The advantage of this way of looking at things is that there is a very simple relationship between the things we say a person or system knows, and the memories, knowledge, or data structures we say he or it has stored.