Knowing Engineers?: A Response to Forsythe

Abstract

Diana Forsythe's paper' contains much interesting material and many thought provoking observations about a particular community of practitioners 'knowledge engineers', members of the expert systems community within Al. In particular, it provides a telling critique in terms of social science interview methodology of the procedures used by those practitioners, especially as regards the process of'knowledge acquisition' (and more specifically the process of 'knowledge elicitation')the attempt to 'capture' from experts the basis for their skills and expertise in a form suitable for encoding into so-called 'expert systems'. In providing this critique, Forsythe offers a promising line of attack which I believe would signally improve the efforts of the expert system practitioners: namely, to consider seriously the interview process as a social transaction in which the two parties negotiate to construct a model of the knowledge at issue. Indeed, such an approach is beginning to emerge as evidenced by the explicit employment of social scientists, especially anthropologists, for carrying out the knowledge elicitation process, and by the development of more sophisticated understandings of the whole knowledge engineering process pioneered primarily by psychologists.2 Forsythe herself, however, doubts whether the adoption of a social science appreciation would in, fact produce any final solution to the 'problem of Knowledge Acquisition', arguing that there is a