Kinds of Knowledge

• Deep Knowledge: Knowledge acquired through years of proper experience.

• Shallow Knowledge: Minimal understanding of the problem area.

• Knowledge as Know-How: Accumulated lessons of practical experience.

• Reasoning and Heuristics: Some of the ways in which humans reason are as follows:
  • Reasoning by analogy: This indicates relating one concept to another.

  • Formal Reasoning: This indicates reasoning by using deductive (exact) or inductive reasoning.
    • Deduction uses major and minor premises.

    • In case of deductive reasoning, new knowledge is generated by using previously specified knowledge.

    • Inductive reasoning implies reasoning from a set of facts to a general conclusion.

    • Inductive reasoning is the basis of scientific discovery.

    • A case is knowledge associated with an operational level.

• Common Sense: This implies a type of knowledge that almost every human being possess in varying forms/amounts.

• We can also classify knowledge on the basis of whether it is procedural, declarative, semantic, or episodic.
  • Procedural knowledge represents the understanding of how to carry out a specific procedure.

  • Declarative knowledge is routine knowledge about which the expert is conscious. It is shallow knowledge that can be readily recalled since it consists of simple and uncomplicated information. This type of knowledge often resides in short-term memory.

  • Semantic knowledge is highly organized, ``chunked'' knowledge that resides mainly in long-term memory. Semantic knowledge can include major concepts, vocabulary, facts, and relationships.

  • Episodic knowledge represents the knowledge based on episodes (experimental information). Each episode is usually ``chunked'' in long-term memory.

• Another way of classifying knowledge is to find whether it is tacit or explicit
  • Tacit knowledge usually gets embedded in human mind through experience.

  • Explicit knowledge is that which is codified and digitized in documents, books, reports, spreadsheets, memos etc.