Editorial: the challenge of situated cognition for symbolic knowledge-based systems

What is situated cognition and what are its implications for the practice of building expert systems? This special issue has collected a range of papers that show situated cognition to be meaningful to the designers of human—computer systems, manifested by a variety of new modelling tools and methods. In this editorial, we offer some brief introductory remarks about situated cognition and the papers. Situated cognition is an approach for understanding cognition that seeks to relate social, neural and psychological views (Clancey, 1997). Situated cognition explores a host of fundamental assumptions about artificial intelligence and the process of building expert systems. These considerations are much more complicated than the traditional symbolic view of knowledge and include the following.