Towards the Principled Engineering of Knowledge

Toward thi: end, knowledge acquisition is sometimes considered a nccessary burden, carried out under protest so that one can gel on with t,he study of cognitive processes in problem solving In this article we argue that, t,he two activities-knowledge acqisitSion and cognitive modeling-are necessarily interwoven, and provide interesting opportunities when t,akcr Logether. Knowledge acquisition shapes cognit,ive modeling because operatzonnl knowledge cont,ains assurnpt,ions nnc directions for its use, t,hat, is, a.11 implicit, processing model In return, problem solving models can profoundly shape knowledge acquisition by providing a framework for the articulation and creation of domain expertise This int,rodllces the theme of this article, t,hat, one can engzneer bodie: of knowledge for various purposes, such as learnability, To the knowledge engineering slogan "knowledge is power," we add "knowledge is an artifact,, worthy of design " The organization of this article is as follows: We first consider the pract,ice of "cognitive advantage " III the t,hird section we suggest some A Shift in Viewpoint from Experts to Clans Over the past decade t,hcrc have been trcmcndous advances in the fabrication of integrated circuits (Robinson, 1980a). Circuits have become smaller and manufacturing costs have dropped dramatically. Design is becoming the dominant cost (Robinson, 19801) with the current round of miniaturization, which goes by the name of VLSI for very large scale integration. This is leading to a substantial int,crest in undcrst,anding design processes.