The Four Forms of Knowledge and Formats for Teaching Each Kind
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Everything that can be taught, learned, and stored (in language, music, painting, sculpture, and other representative media) is one or another of four forms of knowledge---
1. Concepts: the cognitive (thinking) organization of reality into categories, or kinds of things that share certain similarities. The class of housecats. The class of things that have it pretty easy, laying around and licking themselves. The class of felines. The class of mammals. The class of animals. The class of living beings.
2. Facts: statements (subject-predicate) about the features of individual things that are examples of concepts. Everything is an example of one, usually more than one, concept---at the very least, the concept of “thing.” “James Madison was the fourth president.” He was in the class of presidents as well as a member (example) of the class of things that wear pants, things that ride horses, things that write amendments, things that are male, etc.
