Disdain for visual and tactile modes of thinking can mean ignorance of ideas that vitally affect the human condition. Among the activities he examined was shipbuilding, the record of which is contained not in archives but in wooden models. In the period in which American clipper ships took command of the sea, designers carved their way to new hull designs and sent the model to the shipyard. We can't, but his readership could, as could most people at the time. The problem for the historian is that as times and places change, so too does what everyone knows.
Time passes, and with it passes the knowledge that no one thought it worth talking about.
That is a problem for historians, especially the historians who seek to write the history of common people and everyday life. For example, I belong to a generation of men for whom as boys the building of model airplanes from balsa strips and tissue paper was a common hobby. No one said that was what we were doing, but it was, and it turns out to be an important capacity for engineering design. For the textually oriented historian, common knowledge is hard to get at, because people don't talk about it, and the people who possess it pass. Yet, in ways suggested by the passages I've cited, it remains embedded in the objects people leave behind.