Tolk’s Latest Work Examines Philosophy of M&S Applications

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In Dr. Andreas Tolk's latest compilation, Ontology, Epistemology, and Teleology for Modeling and Simulation, the editor sought to bring together internationally recognized leaders in M&S as well as new up-and-coming thinkers to answer the essential questions that should be asked of any essential discipline: What do we know, how do we gain knowledge, and why and when can we rely on the recommendations of modeling and simulation?

Experts in the philosophy of science, computer science, and modeling and simulation are brought together in one work by Tolk to examine how ontology, epistemology, and teleology may advance and enable the next generation of intelligent modeling and simulation applications.

It is well understood that a simulation can provide the technical means to display the behavior of a system over time, including following observed trends to predict future possible states, but how reliable and trustworthy are such predictions? The questions about what we can know (ontology), how we gain new knowledge (epistemology), and what we do with this knowledge (teleology) are therefore illuminated from these very different perspectives, as each experts uses a different facet to look at these challenges.

The result of bringing these perspectives into one book is a challenging compendium that gives room for a spectrum of challenges: from general philosophy questions, such as can we use modeling and simulation and other computational means at all to discover new knowledge, down to computational methods to improve semantic interoperability between systems or methods addressing how to apply the recent insights of service oriented approaches to support distributed artificial intelligence.

Tolk's latest work begins the dialogue for students, scholars, and practitioners, to peak their curiosity, and to encourage them to learn more in order to fully address the topics of ontology, epistemology, and teleology from philosophical, computational, and conceptual viewpoints.

ISBN 978-3-642-31139-0