Insight and Knowledge

The recognition that cognition is situated is a major advance over the essentially Platonic approach of earlier AI. We are starting to realise that the knowledge we express isn't a poorer expression of deeper (implicitly archetypal) knowledge. Rather knowledge is created for specific single use purposes and the knowledge created is shaped by its purpose in the world and the concerns of its creators interacting with the world. The purpose of this paper is to warn that these new approaches may have the same failings as classical AI if they do not ask how we recognise that the knowledge we have created makes sense of reality in some way. Lonergan's notion of insight provides a philosophical basis for recognising how knowledge makes sense of reality and in particular is relevant to these new ideas of "situated cognition" (Lonergan, 1959). It is suggested that new technologies developed in a Lonergan context are more likely to be successful.