Perhaps it would be possible to distinguish between social knowledge, which is *out there* in encyclopaedias, data banks, log tables and so on, and personal knowledge. (The former always begins as the latter, and is then encoded for more general use).
The relationship between personal knowledge and thought is, I would have imagined, intimate. Seen from this angle, thought would be the process by which knowledge is rearranged to deal with new data. If you think of personal knowledge as arranged in networks - something like Hannibal Lecter's
memory palace - then thought occurs when you need to shift the objects around to make room for a new item.
Sometimes the rearrangement is fairly minor: we shift a couple of books around so as to slip a new acquisition into its alphabetically designated place. Sometimes it's more radical: a new book put
the whole of your present classificationn into question.
Of course, the library may resist: there's a finite number of shelves and only so many ways you can divide the space. Similarly, the brain may have some semblance of organization built into it. It may be, as the neo-phrenologists have it, that the child is born with a number of discrete faculties, as Howard Gardner insists. We have a language faculty, a maths faculty, a kinetic faculty and so on - the numbers vary. It may also be that there are ways of thinking - as TGS suggested - that are so deeply embedded that we do not even consciously summon them or recognize that they are there most of the time.
If so, it is perhaps these faculties, and the ways of thinking that allow us to catch a glimpse of Aristotle's thought through the translation, through the differences in time, through the robe that the church has wrapped him in, and through our own education and experience.