164 9 General Intelligence in the Everyday Human World
e Isolatedly procedural knowledge is that which is much more easily communicable demonstratively
e Isolatedly sensory knowledge is that which is much more easily communicable depic- tively
e Isolatedly attentive knowledge is that which is much more easily communicable indica- tively
e Isolatedly intentional knowledge is that which is much more easily communicable in- tentionally
This categorization of knowledge types resembles many ideas from the cognitive theory of memory [TC05], although the distinctions drawn here are a little crisper than any classification currently derivable from available neurological or psychological data.
Of course there may be much knowledge, of relevance to systems seeking intelligence accord- ing to the ECP, that does not fall into any of these categories and constitutes “mixed knowledge.” There are some very important specific subclasses of mixed knowledge. For instance, episodic knowledge (knowledge about specific real or hypothetical sets of events) will most easily be communicated via a combination of declarative, sensory and (in some cases) procedural com- munication. Scientific and mathematical knowledge are generally mixed knowledge, as is most everyday commonsense knowledge.
Some cases of mixed knowledge are reasonably well decomposable, in the sense that they decompose into knowledge items that individually fall into some specific knowledge type. For instance, an experimental chemistry procedure may be much more easily communicable pro- cedurally, whereas an allied piece of knowledge from theoretical chemistry may be much more easily communicable declaratively; but in order to fully communicate either the experimental procedure or the abstract piece of knowledge, one may ultimately need to communicate both aspects.
Also, even when the best way to communicate something is mixed-mode, it may be possible to identify one mode that poses the most important part of the communication. An example would be a chemistry experiment that is best communicated via a practical demonstration together with a running narrative. It may be that the demonstration without the narrative would be vastly more valuable than the narrative without the demonstration. To cover such cases we may make less restrictive definitions such as
e Interactively declarative knowledge is that which is much more easily communicable in a manner dominated by linguistic communication
and so forth. We call these “interactive knowledge categories,” by contrast to the “isolated knowledge categories” introduced earlier.
9.3.0.1 Naturalness of Knowledge Categories
Next we introduce an assumption we call NKC, for Naturalness of Knowledge Categories. The NKC assumption states that the knowledge in each of the above isolated and interac- tive communication-modality-focused categories forms a “natural category,” in the sense that for each of these categories, there are many different properties shared by a large percentage of the knowledge in the category, but not by a large percentage of the knowledge in the other cat- egories. This means that, for instance, procedural knowledge systematically (and statistically) has different characteristics than the other kinds of knowledge.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013080