Embodied knowledge

This post by Aled Maclean-Jones where he uses Tom Cruise’s filmography to explain what is embodied knowledge is… chef’s kiss.

In the world of Final Reckoning, where the Entity is all-seeing, things unsearchable and uncheckable like secret clues and symbols become vital. The president convinces an admiral to help her by writing down a date whose significance only the two of them understand. That admiral earns the trust of the USS Ohio’s commander by giving Cruise a medal whose meaning is private between them. To fool the Russians, who they know are listening in, Cruise’s team sends coordinates that direct him to the opposite side of the world from where he needs to be: a feint they know only he could decode.

What Cruise and his team carry in their heads and bodies not only saves them but the world. Donloe, the CIA chief exiled to Alaska, knows the submarine’s coordinates because he memorized them a decade ago. Tapeesa, his wife, can deliver the lifesaving decompression tent because she still knows how to navigate by compass and sextant. Grace, Hayley Atwell’s pickpocket-turned-teammate, saves the world through a skill so subtle it can barely be named: the thing that separates a ‘good pickpocket’ from a ‘great one’ — timing.

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form.

And a little further down in the post.

It was Ryle who, in 1945, formulated the distinction that runs through Cruise’s films: that between knowledge of and knowledge how. The former was propositional, the sort you can articulate in neat, explicit statements. The latter was practical aptitude, the kind only revealed by competent action. Crucially, you can possess the latter without the former; knowing how does not entail being able to explain it. Donloe, crouched over a live nuclear bomb in Final Reckoning, gives the idea its best cinematic gloss. “Where’d you learn to do this?” asks his colleague, watching nervously. “Never said I did,” he replies.