I put down the cup and turn to my mind.  It is up to my mind to find the truth.  But how?  What grave uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself;  when it, the seeker, is also the obscure country where it must seek and where all its baggage will be nothing to it.  Seek?  Not only that:  create.  It is face to face with something that does not yet exist and that only it can accomplish, and bring into its light.

— Proust • In Search of Lost Time

Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems • Architecture of Inquiry

It is important to remember that knowledge is a different sort of goal from the run-of-the-mill setpoints a system might have.  The typical goal is a state that a system has actually experienced many times before, like normal body temperature for a human being.  But a particular state of knowledge an intelligent system moves toward may be a state it has never been through before.  The fundamental equivocation on this point expressed in Plato’s Meno, whether learning is functionally equivalent to remembering, was discussed above.  In spite of this quibble, it still seems necessary to regard states of knowledge as a distinctive class.  The reasons for this may lie in the fact that a useful definition of inquiry for human beings necessarily involves a whole community of inquiry.