Michael Polanyi opened a durable line of inquiry in 1966 with a single, deceptively simple observation: we know more than we can tell. A face is recognisable among a thousand others, instantly, though the person recognising it could not write down the precise combination of features that made it identifiable. A skilled cyclist keeps their balance through a continuous set of micro-adjustments they could not consciously describe, let alone teach through verbal instruction alone

We live in a culture that has decided, largely without examining the decision, that propositional knowledge is the real kind and everything else is something lesser: intuition, gut feeling, superstition, or at best a heuristic waiting to be replaced by a proper algorithm. Ryle, Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, Klein: these are not fringe thinkers. They represent decades of serious philosophical and scientific work showing that this picture is wrong. The body knows.