Adams-Webber J. R. (1985) Construing self and others. In: Epting F. & Landifield A. W. (eds.) Anticipating personal construct psychology. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE: 58–69.
Concurs with N. M. Agnew and J. L. Brown’s views that ontological and epistemological presuppositions impose certain constraints on the pursuit of knowledge. These authors have captured the constructivist thrust of G. A. Kelly’s (1955) psychology of personal constructs in their central theme.
Ford K. M. & Adams-Webber J. R. (1992) Knowledge acquisition and constructivist epistemology. In: Hoffman R. R. (ed.) The psychology of expertise. Springer-Verlag, New York: 121–136. https://cepa.info/5483
The most fundamental step in the knowledge acquisition phase of the development of an expert system is the elicitation of knowledge from a skilled individual. The knowledge acquisition phase has typically involved the knowledge engineer’s working closely with a specialist to elicit relevant knowledge from the latter’s domain. This is typically a tedious and ad hoc cycle that consists of extensive verbal interviews followed by the construction of prototypes, testing, and more interviews. This approach has two significant drawbacks – it has been extremely laborious, and domain experts often have difficulty articulating their knowledge in forms useful to the knowledge engineer. Indeed, it has been suggested (Feigenbaum & McCorduck, 1983) that “the problem of knowledge acquisition is the critical bottleneck in artificial intelligence” (p. 80).
Ford K. M., Petry F. E., Adams-Webber J. R. & Chang P. J. (1991) An approach to knowledge acquisition based on the structure of personal construct systems. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 3(1): 78–88.
A research effort aimed at the development and unification of the prerequisite underlying theoretical foundations for an adequate approach to knowledge elicitation from repertory grid data is described. A theory of confirmation that incorporates the basic tenets of personal construct psychology directly into the logic as a basis for the determination of relevance is offered, thus strengthening the logic and extending personal construct psychology. These largely theoretical developments are applied to the representation and analysis of repertory grid data. The concept of an alpha -plane is introduced as a binary decomposition of repertory grid data that furnishes the realization of construct extensions (or ranges of convenience) needed to determine the range of relevance of a particular generalization or hypothesis. In addition, they provide the uniquely determined string of incidences required by any application of Bundy’s truth functional incidence calculus. The theories are applied to the design and construction of NICOD-a semiautomated medical knowledge acquisition system. The system has been successfully employed in the elicitation of valuable heuristic radiological knowledge (mammography) that the domain experts (radiologists) were otherwise unable to articulate.