BASING KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION TOOLS IN PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY

Abstract

Personal construct psychology is a theory of individual and group psychological and social processes that has been used extensively in knowledge acquisition research to model the cognitive processes of human experts. The psychology has the advantage of taking a constructivist position appropriate to the modeling of specialist human knowledge but basing this on a positivist scientific position that characterizes human conceptual structures in axiomatic terms that translate directly to computational form. The repertory grid knowledge elicitation methodology is directly derived from personal construct psychology. In its original form, this methodology was based on the notion of dichotomous constructs and did not encompass the ordinal relations between them captured in semantic net elicitation. However, it was extended in successive tools developed for applied knowledge acquisition and tested in a wide variety of applications. This paper gives an overview of personal construct psychology and its expression as an intensional logic describing the cognitive processes of anticipatory agents, and uses this to survey knowledge acquisition tools deriving from personal construct psychology and to suggest how future tool architectures may be designed in an integrated fashion within this framework.