Knowledge

• Knowledge
• Cognition

Cognitive science

Cognitive science:
Science of knowing. Explaining psychological or philosophical phenomena with the processes, mechanisms, logics or systems that implement or actualize them.
Modeling-oriented.
Brain-oriented cognitive science: Recent development of neuroimaging.

Consciousness

• Consciousness
Knowing that one knows, or feels, or believes...
• Agency of oneself in knowing
John Searle: Consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain.
Are machines conscious (Searle: 'strong AI')?
Are animals conscious?
Are communities conscious?
Feelings as roots of consciousness (Antonio Damasio).
• Emotions
Questioning consciousness, (e.g. Daniel Dennett).

Cognitivism

Cognition of pure mental operations.
Cognition disconnected from the physical implementation of cognition.
Artificial intelligence (AI): Techno-optimism of the 50's.

Holism

Cognition is implemented by the brain anbd the body and are essentially defined by this fact.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/1961): Phenomenology of Perception
Autopoiesis theory (Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela 1980): Mind and conscious emerge in embodied, enactive and self-defining process.
• Embodied cognitive science

Epistemology

• Epistemology (etymology)
• Epistemology
Study of the origin of knowledge.
Often discussed together with ontology.

Empiricism

• Empiricism acquiring knowledge by experiments
• Typically associated with natural sciences

Rationalism

• Logical inference
Associated with philosophy, assumed of any academic research.
Assumes analytical distance to the target of observation.
Dilemma of analytical distance: The researcher often has to be involved.
• Ellipticism as faulty inference. Definition by self-reference, e.g., autopoiesis theory
Dilemma of recursive interaction systems: Ellipticism is a characteristic!

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics: Understanding with reference to discourse contexts
Typically associated with humanities.
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Paul Ricoeur

Knowledge a priori and a posteriori

A priori: Knowledge that is independent of experience.
• Immanuel Kant
A posteriori: Knowledge dependent on experience.

Constructivism

• Constructivism
Knowledge as something that is constructed.
Social constructionism: Lev Vygotsky
• Michel Foucalt. Foucault by Nola
• Readings on constructivism

Emergence of knowledge and self-organization

Self-organization: systemic organization of knowledge without supervision
• Self-organizing maps (Teuvo Kohonen)
• Self-organizing behavioral patterns (Scott Kelso)
• Mind-brain as a statistical inference machine
• Conceptual spaces (Peter Gärdenfors)

Representation

• Representation
• Making present, concretization, visualization, formalization with a mental object

Neural representations

Representationalism: representing objects of the real world with mental objects
• Anti-representationalism, e.g. activity theory
• Representations in the brain, revealed by neuroimaging techniques
• Somatotopies (maps of skin)
• Tonotopies (maps of auditory organization)
• Retinotopies (maps of vision)

Ontologies as representations

A priori ontologies

• Category
• Taxonomy
• Classification
• Carl von LinnŽ''s Systema Naturae
• E.g. Library of congress classification

Self-organizing ontologies

• Tagging systems, folksonomies
Core method of collaborative ontology, e.g. Delicious, YouTube, Flickr etc.

Ontological space (ontospaces)

• Kaipainen et al. 2008, Kaipainen & Hautamäki (2009)
Description of ontologies by means of descriptive coordinates.
Allows knowledge construction by exploration of multiple perspectives.
Categories and hierarchies emerge in a perspective-specific way.

Conclude

How does knowledge relate to media?
What kind of epistemology do you assume?

Ontospace of IMKE

Experiment of collaborative tagging and ontospace exploration.
• Ontospace of IMKE
1. Fill in your liking dimensions (your row) using values between 0 and 1.
• 2. Add new liking dimensions (columns)
3. Return to 1, keep repeating.
4. Download as text and replace empty cells with 0.
5. Explore different perspectives with:
Clustering demo with sliders. Open IMKE-likings from the software.
Clustering demo with priority drag-n-drop, Open IMKE likings from your desktop (save it there).
• Hierarchy & narrative demo

Other data to experiment with

Download (to desktop):
• IMKE likings
• Creatures
• Movie script
More data...

Issues

Naming and concept-building.
Inference: Induction of deduction?
• Establishing groups? Emergent parties? Automated coupling (email, Facebook, physical meetings...)
Identifying contrasts?
Settling conflicts?
True story?
True categorization?
Power of categorization?