ABSTRACT
The argument goes as follows: if a large proportion of intelligent behaviour is accounted for by already acquired knowledge, that knowledge must be mentally represented in memory. It is tempting to think of knowledge as something very rarified, displayed only by philosophers and scholars. One of the earliest and neatest experiments showing that people rely on structured knowledge was carried out by Katona (1940), a psychologist working in the Gestalt tradition. It has proved a very persuasive idea that knowledge representations are organized in memory as a semantic network of interconnected concepts which represent semantic relations between categories of concepts. This distinction between general knowledge and personal experience has become an important issue in cognitive psychology under the guise of semantic memory and episodic memory. Further support for the notion of a distinction between episodic and semantic knowledge is provided by a curious case reported in a television programme presented by Jonathan Miller in 1986.
