Knowledge representation and the embodied mind: Towards a philosophy and technology of personalized informatics

Abstract

Knowledge representation has a long tradition in logic and philosophy. Automated reasoning with ontologies and categories had been discussed in philosophy, before it was formalized in artificial intelligence and e.g. applied in information systems. But, most of our knowledge is implicit and unconscious, situated and personalized. It is not formally represented, but embodied knowledge, which is learnt by doing, applied by self-organization, and understood by bodily interacting with (social) environments. In a complex world, we have to be able to act and decide with incomplete and fuzzy knowledge under the conditions of bounded rationality. The bounded rationality of embodied minds is a challenge of informatics especially in the complex information world of Internet applications and Web-based services offering access to a vast variety of information sources. It overcomes traditional concepts of mind-body dualism in the philosophy of mind, traditional knowledge representation in AI, and rational agents ("homo oeconomicus") in economics. Personalized informatics opens a trans-disciplinary perspective for philosophy and working technology. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.