Preliminaries

Abstract

This is an introductory chapter. We present first a short comparison of the problem of knowledge and technology creation versus the problem of knowledge justification and technology validation and verification. We give a very condensed review of the history of epistemological knowledge justification theories and approaches. Then we characterize novel approaches, new micro‐theories of knowledge and technology creation that emerged in the last decade of the 20^th Century and in the beginning years of the 21^st. We interpret them as one of the signs of the beginning of a new informational and knowledge civilization era; main megatrends of this era are listed. The last of them – the intellectual megatrend of mental challenges, of changing the way of perceiving the world – is related to the need for understanding diverse new concepts. We stress several such concepts, but perhaps most important is the change from the principle of reduction, typical of philosophy in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, to the principle of emergence of essentially independent, irreducible, thus in a sense transcendental concepts on new levels of complexity. We also stress that such a principle is not only observed empirically in biology in punctuated evolution, not only results rationally from mathematical theories of deterministic chaos and complexity, but also emerges practically from coping with complexity in modern computer networks. We finish this chapter by briefly outlining new challenges to epistemology, particularly in view of demands of computational intelligence, and the contents of this book.