CONCEPT
Enacted Knowledge (Ingold)
Knowledge constituted by bodily engagement with materials — not stored in the mind and executed through the hands, but living in the relationship itself, untransferable except through practice.
Enacted knowledge is knowledge through something rather than knowledge about something. The weaver's sensitivity to tension variations, the potter's detection of off-center clay through the wheel's wobble, the programmer's instinct that something is architecturally wrong before any error manifests — these are not applications of stored mental representations. They are perceptions produced in the moment of engagement, constituted by the body's history of material contact. Enacted knowledge cannot be fully articulated because it exists in the doing. Articulate it and you produce a representation — a map, not the territory. This distinction matters for AI because large language models process representations, not enactments. The training corpus contains descriptions of making, but the model does not make. The knowledge it produces is structurally representational.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge — 'we can know more than we can tell' — provided a foundation, but Ingold goes further. For Polanyi, tacit knowledge is knowledge that happens to be