Scientists avoid "mental state talk", and prefer to stick to "scientific" ideas that come from information processing theory. "This has produced many good theories about problem solving, pattern recognition, and other important facets of psychology, but on the whole it hasn't led to useful ways to describe the workings of our dispositions, attitudes, and feelings."
Minsky argues that the K-line mechanism could sstill work for these more subjective states, and in fact can explain some memory paradoxes: e.g., "Why do we find it easier to recollect our attitudes and feelings than to describe what actually took place?" Minsky's answer -- K-lines can reactivate a complex state with many components, a state that can be experienced, but which (because of its complexity) is hard to describe.
But, K-lines raise their own problems, namely, comprehension or recall of very specific facts. "Once we think in terms of K-line memories, it becomes easy to imagine, at least in principle, how a person could recall a general impression of a complex previous experience -- but it becomes hard to understand how a person can so easily comprehend a specific statement like `John has more candy than Mary'."
(NB: Minsky is presenting the K-line model as an inversion of typical memory theories. The typical theories deal with specific facts well, and with general impressions poorly. K-line theory reverses this. Question: Why does Minsky want to take this inverted route?)
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