It is common to ask two sorts of questions when we explore a new world: "What" do we see, feel, experience, know? (structural descriptions) And "how" do we know? (functional descriptions)
Minsky describes that better concepts to represent knowledge would be "actors", "situations" and "actions". Depending on a context (= situation), an actor can issue only a limited set of actions. (Furthermore there is the concept of negative expertise, i.e. know-how that we employ to avoid a paradox.)
It can be argued that knowledge results not so much from learning new skills, but from finding new ways to organize knowledge that someone already has. This is the point of Papert's principle: "Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows."
