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In a similar manner, it has been argued within the KE literature that the
psychological constructs used by experts can be used as the basis for informing the
design and composition of conceptual knowledge collections [
27
]. This argument
is based on a framework for expertise transfer known as Kelly's Personal Construct
Theory (PCT). PCT defi nes humans as “anticipatory systems”, where individuals
create templates, or constructs that allow them to recognize situations or patterns
in the “information world” surrounding them. These templates are then used to
anticipate the outcome of a potential action given knowledge of similar previous
experiences [
28
]. Kelly views all people as “personal scientists” who make sense
of the world around them through the use of a hypothetico-deductive reasoning
system. The details of PCT help to explain how experts create and use such con-
structs. Specifi cally, Kelly's fundamental postulate is that “
a person's processes are
psychologically channelized by the way in which he anticipated events
” [
28
]. This
is complemented by the theory's fi rst corollary, which is summarized by his state-
ment that [
28
]:
Man looks at his world through transparent templates which he creates and then attempts to
fi t over the realities of which the world is composed… Constructs are used for predictions
of things to come… The construct is a basis for making a distinction… not a class of
objects, or an abstraction of a class, but a dichotomous reference axis.
Building upon these basic concepts, Kelly goes on to state in his Dichotomy
Corollary that “
a person's construction system is composed of a fi nite number of
dichotomous constructs
” [
28
]. Finally, the parallel nature of personal constructs
and conceptual knowledge is illustrated in Kelly's Organization Corollary, which
states, “
each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience of anticipating
events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs
”
[
27
,
28
].
When taken as a whole, the two preceding theoretical frameworks provide the
basic premises for arguing that:
1. Domain experts (e.g., humans) use personal constructs that roughly approximate
those constructs that defi ne formal knowledge (e.g., conceptual, strategic, and
procedural knowledge), so as to make sense of the “information world” sur-
rounding them;
2. Formal knowledge can be represented in a computationally tractable format,
based upon the physical symbol hypothesis, and again, such symbolic systems
closely approximate the defi nitions of conceptual knowledge; and
3. Knowledge engineering methods, and in particular, knowledge acquisition tech-
niques, provide a set of tools for the elicitation and representation (in computable
formats) of domain expert knowledge, helping to bridge the two preceding and
complementary postulates.
Thus, it is possible to systematically and rigorously collect, formalize, and
represent domain knowledge in a manner such that computers can reason upon
those knowledge collections in a high throughput manner, thus replicating expert
hypothesis generation processes in a way that is not constrained by innate human
cognitive limitations and/or potential biases. Such a conclusion “opens the door”
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