Don R. Swanson’s concept of undiscovered knowledge and artificial intelligence

Abstract

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.