In general, procedural knowledge is the type of knowledge that someone possesses and demonstrates through the process of doing something. Declarative knowledge, on the other hand, is a type of knowledge that indicates someone knows something and can be a more abstract understanding than a practical understanding. The term can be used in a variety of contexts, including cognitive psychology and intellectual property law, and each context tends to mean something slightly different. As an example, the term “intellectual property” usually refers to a collection of information that can be owned a company and is often referred to as a “trade secret.”
Procedural knowledge has three basic applications, each of which is best understood in the context of a different field of study. Procedural knowledge is typically viewed as the knowledge of how to do something in cognitive psychology, which is the study of how people understand things and how the mind works to gain, recall, and use knowledge. This is frequently unconscious knowledge, and while someone may demonstrate it, it is often something that the person does not consider. A baker, for example, may be able to tell when dough is ready feeling it, but may struggle to explain that feeling to someone else.
In the same way, procedural knowledge can be something that someone knows how to do without even thinking about it. During infant and early childhood development, for example, most people learn to talk and communicate verbally. While most people are capable of communicating in this manner, they rarely consider how they form words and express ideas verbally. Not declarative knowledge, but procedural knowledge.
Procedural knowledge is information that is considered a “trade secret” or information that is a company’s intellectual property and is extremely valuable to the company. It usually describes how something is made and frequently contains both secret and public information. This type of information can be transferred when a company is purchased, and the unauthorized release or sale of this information is frequently illegal.
Procedural knowledge is a term used in artificial intelligence development to describe programming that tells an artificial intelligence how to do something. This type of programming includes a variety of procedures that artificial intelligence could perform and then allows the system to complete those procedures. In a declarative knowledge-based artificial intelligence system, the system knows what it can do rather than specific procedures, and then a secondary program makes effective use of the proper knowledge.