The Science of Knowledge

THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

W. Curtiss Priest Principal Research Associate Emeritus, MIT Director, Center for Information, Technology & Society (Formerly the Center for Information, Technology & Society at MIT) Cyber-Educator of the Year, Newsweek

In the rush to discover knowledge we often forget that we have discovered a good deal of knowledge and it is time to think about a unification of this knowledge. E. O. Wilson wrote in "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge," one schema for this unification, but from the perspective of a deductionist beginning with the biological roots of human knowledge. However, such a schema asks too much of the learner to, say, predict human behavior from the interaction of biological cells.

A more pragmatic school, practiced by Charles S. Peirce and Henry James of Harvard, has been continued at the University of Pennsylvania under Professors Churchman, Ackoff, and others. This plenary presentation describes how knowledge can be reduced and unified by a more workable scheme of operational definitions. These definitions are akin to the rigor found in the formulations in math and chemistry and have an exactness that allows the learner, now doer, to achieve outcomes more easily across a broad range of endeavors.

Dr. W. Curtiss Priest is Director of the Center for Information, Technology & Society, Principal Research Associate Emeritus, MIT, Cyber-Educator of the Year, Newsweek magazine, December 1997, and former faculty, MIT Media Laboratory.

Dr. Priest places the capabilities of Computer Science in the context of learning, government decision-making, and patient-health provider interactions. As these contexts often require one-on- one learning, he has designed and implemented various peer-to-peer communication systems. His research areas are learning objects, instructional applications development, social implications, and distributed learning systems.