The unacknowledged legacy

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BC). It centres on Plato's discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato's Republic

Introducing Inductive Methods in Knowledge Acquisition By Divide-and-Conquer

In this paper we present the outline of a method that combines a divide-and-conquer approach, that is common in knowledge acquisition and software engineering, with the use of inductive techniques. The idea is to guide decomposition of a knowledge acquisition problem into subpr oblems by the expected costs and benefits of applying elicitation or induction t o acquire the knowledge for part of the target knowledge. The method is illustra ted with a "rational reconstruction" of a knowledge acquisition process that involved inductive techniques. Keywords: Knowledge acquisition, learning goals, decomposition Introduction Knowledge acquisition for knowledge-based systems involves the formalisation of human knowledge about a certain task to build a system that can perform this task. Knowledge can be acquired in different ways. The classical way is to elicit knowledge from a human expert and formalise this in an operational language, e.g. using an expert system shell. This is often extende..