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In PNAS Kim et al.(1) detail congenitally blind individuals’ extensive knowledge of the visual appearance of animals. This is exciting and important work speaking directly to long-standing questions about the role of direct perceptual experience in semantic knowledge. Despite lacking visual input, blind people show substantial alignment with one another and with sighted people in judging animal shape, skin texture, size, and, to a much lesser extent, color. Where does this knowledge come from? One possibility, advanced by the authors, is inferential reasoning. Knowing that birds have feathers and that ostriches are birds allows blind people to infer that ostriches have feathers despite never having seen an ostrich (or feathers). Another possibility is the distributional structure of language. The authors reject the “obvious idea... that blind individuals learn from sighted people’s verbal descriptions” on the grounds that …