The Knowledge Spectrum

Abstract

Like Chemistry’s Table of Elements, the Knowledge Spectrum organizes information about knowledge and supports the decomposition of intelligent behavior into its cognitive elements. Building on the Knowledge Combustion analogy, the Knowledge Spectrum places seven knowledge types on a continuum and explains the relation between information, pragmatic knowledge, and semantic knowledge. By explaining the influence of coordination, control, and semantics, the body/mind dichotomy of technical knowledge is extended. While the Knowledge Spectrum provides a static view of knowledge, its underlying premises provide one that is dynamic. According to knowledge chemistry principles, different knowledge types must interact to permit intelligent action, and more complex knowledge types (technical, semantic, and structuring causes) subsume more primitive ones (rules, signals, and maps). By explaining the role of pragmatic knowledge, this paper lends support for the revised knowledge-KM pyramid and advances efforts to catalog and audit knowledge resources and to assess cognitive force.