They thought that expert knowledge could be improved by encoding it in a computer program, because in this way it would become “explicit and public”: “Indeed, one of the most important results of this enterprise may be the development of ways to express formally, and to record systematically, knowledge that is usually unexpressed and unrecorded.” This is tantamount to saying what expertise should be – public, explicit, objective – rather than what it is. Put differently, when you scrape the thin coating of description and definition, what you discover underneath is something much more
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