The Philosophical Foundation of Conceptual Knowledge – A Sociopragmatic Approach

Information Systems Research is still said to have no substantial philosophical foundation. As human inquiry relies on social contextualization, shared language and common practice, several consequences for conceptual models and conceptual knowledge are resulting. With the approach of “sociopragmatic constructivism”, we seek to develop a philosophical foundation for the understanding of conceptual knowledge and its possible representations, posing the primate of the social over the individual. As we discovered only recently, this paper is a response to exercise 7.9 in Sowa’s book “Conceptual Structures – Information Processing in Mind and Machine”: Select some [...] philosophical point that was not mentioned in this book. Relate it to conceptual graphs and show whether it helps to confirm the current theory or requires some extension or modification of it.” [12] Instead of focusing on conceptual graphs, we target philosophical foundations of conceptual knowledge and knowledge representations in general. Starting from the simple notion of data processing in the early 50s, we seem to have reached the ‘knowledge age’ in our so-called ‘postmodern’ society as well as in computer science [3], [5], [2]. In the domain of artificial intelligence, the notion of knowledge representation has a long tradition. But the promise of computerized knowledge representations, regarding substitution of human cognitive capabilities, did not yield the expected results. To overcome this unsatisfying situation, a broader approach was chosen, involving other disciplines like neurology, psychology, linguistics etc., which eventu-