CONCEPT
Body Knowledge
The practical, sensorimotor know-how that lives in the body itself — knowing how in Gilbert Ryle's sense — and the kind of understanding that AI tools systematically bypass when they generate output without the struggle that would have deposited it.
Body knowledge refers to the practical capacities that living organisms develop through sustained physical engagement with resistant material. Gilbert Ryle's 1949 distinction between knowing that (propositional knowledge, statable in words) and knowing how (practical knowledge, exercisable only in activity) laid the foundation; Noë and other enactivists extended it into the claim that bodily know-how is the more fundamental form of knowledge, the ground from which propositional knowledge emerges. The senior engineer's architectural intuition, the cook's feel for when the onions are ready, the surgeon's tactile sense of tissue — none of these are stored as propositions. They live in the body, deposited through thousands of hours of skilled engagement with resistant material.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept traces to Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949), which attacked what Ryle called the 'intellectualist legend' — the idea that all intelligent action is preceded by an act of theoretical reasoning. Ryle argued