Knowledge-Level Hypothesis

An AI system is said to be a knowledge-level system when it rationally brings to bear all its knowledge onto every problem it attempts to solve. Thus, knowledge is the medium of transaction at the knowledge level and the behaviorial law is the principle of maximum rationality. This is analogous to a circuit-level description of electrical systems that utilize current and voltage as the medium and follow basic conservation and conversion laws such as Kirchoff's and Ohm's Laws.

Hierarchically, the knowledge level lies above the symbol level where all of the knowledge in the system is represented. In other words, a tacit assumption in AI is that a knowledge-level system must contain a symbol system (i.e. this is simply a re-statement of the physical symbol system hypothesis). In humans, the symbol level corresponds to the cognitive band and the knowledge level to the rational band. However, in the latter case, humans only approximate a knowledge-level system, due to the constraints imposed by bounded rationality. In Unified Theories of Cognition, Newell suggested that psychology is the study of this approximation, when the architecture "shows through" and behavior is not mediated by knowledge alone.

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