Don R. Swanson’s concept of undiscovered knowledge and artificial intelligence
Elbakyan A.
2024Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences
Filosofiya Nauki i Tehniki
2024#29Issue 234 - 46 pp.
The 2024 will be an anniversary year for Don R. Swanson, who was born 100 years ago. The works of Swanson are almost unknown in philosophy, yet his name is well recognized in the field of artificial intelligence, where it became foundational for a new sub-field of automatic generation of scientific hypotheses. The aim of this article is to introduce readers to the original concept of undiscovered knowledge proposed by D.R. Swanson. The second aim will be to investigate its relationship with other types: tacit, or implicit and open knowledge. The author develops ideas of Popper by proposing that not only physical world, but also the world of objective knowledge can be a source of new, non-trivial knowledge. Therefore, the search for novel scientific hypotheses has to start in the library rather than in the lab. This search can be made automatic given advances in the technologies of artificial intelligence. The paper overviews historical development and current capabilities of AI to discover hidden knowledge in scientific literature. However, as will be shown in this article, advances in technologies of open access to knowledge is critical for the progress of science as well. This conclusion follows from the fact that undiscovered knowledge is in many respects the problem of access.
artificial intelligence , automatic hypothesis gene-ration , bibliometrics , implicit knowledge , large language models , literature-based discovery , medicine , natural language processing , open science , social epistemology
Text of the article Перейти на текст статьи
Sci-Hub, Kazakhstan
Sci-Hub
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026