What Stephen Turner’s Theory of Tacit Knowledge Reveals About How Power Works

Sociology has a problem with invisible things. The most important forces shaping human behavior are often the ones nobody can adequately articulate. Stephen Turner spent much of his career developing a framework for understanding this problem, and his conclusions are uncomfortable.
Turner’s central target is tacit knowledge, and his argument is that we have misunderstood what it is and how it works. was right that tacit knowledge is real, that people know more than they can tell, that skilled performance draws on something causally effective that cannot be fully articulated, and that this knowledge is irreducibly personal rather than propositional. The master craftsman knows how to throw a pot but cannot completely specify in words what he knows. The experienced physician recognizes a diagnosis before she can consciously explain why. The jazz musician feels when to depart from the melody in ways that no rulebook could capture. Turner accepts all of this. His target is the move that social theorists made on top of Polanyi’s insight: the claim that tacit knowledge is shared, that it can be downloaded from a collective server, that when a master transmits his formation to an apprentice something like the same mental structure is reproduced in the apprentice’s mind that exists in the master’s.
This collective version of the tacit knowledge claim is, Turner argues, philosophically incoherent and ideologically convenient. It is philosophically incoherent because we have no direct access to other people’s mental states. We observe behavior and infer that the mental states producing that behavior resemble the mental states that produce our own similar behavior. What looks like shared tacit formation, a community of people who respond to situations in coordinated ways without explicit agreement, might reflect genuine shared mental structures, or it might reflect convergent responses to shared external environments, similar training that produced similar explicit habits, social enforcement mechanisms that punish deviation without transmitting any mental content, or some combination of these. Behavior alone cannot distinguish between these explanations. The assumption of mental sharing is almost always doing more work than it can do.
It is ideologically convenient because the appearance of shared formation protects incumbents from having to specify their authority in publicly inspectable terms. The professor who cannot explain why a dissertation falls short, the judge who appeals to legal intuition, the master craftsman who cannot articulate what distinguishes excellent from mediocre work: all invoke a version of tacit knowledge that insulates their authority from scrutiny. If the relevant competence is by definition not fully articulable, it cannot be fully evaluated by outsiders. The claim to shared formation is a claim to authority that cannot be audited.
Turner’s framework connects this philosophical point to a practical one. What looks like a tradition transmitting formation across generations is often better described as a set of social enforcement mechanisms that produce behavioral conformity and designate certain behaviors as signs of formation while punishing deviation. The formation appears shared because those who deviate are excluded and those who remain are the ones whose behavior was already compatible with the enforcement mechanisms. The appearance of shared formation is produced by selection rather than transmission.
The distinction matters more than it first appears. Turner’s encounter with Randall Collins at Vatro Murvar’s seminar series at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee makes this concrete. Both were working from the same Weber text, The General Economic History, but asking different questions. Turner was trying to reconstruct Weber’s actual causal argument, tracing its relationship to Mill’s methods and identifying its source in Weber’s engagement with earlier colleagues. The result was a long chase into probabilistic causality that produced a genuine clarification of what kind of causal claim Weber was making and what made it defensible.
Collins then published a paper presenting Weber’s theory of capitalism’s origins in the American Sociological Review. He drew arrows between causes and outcomes. He never addressed the causal structure. For Turner this was not a minor oversight. Collins had been presenting what were essentially correlations in a format that looked like deductive theory throughout his career, claiming derivations that the logical structure of his arguments could not sustain. Deduction is strict: conclusions are supposed to follow as a matter of form. Collins’s greater the X, greater the Y formulations were correlational patterns dressed as theoretical derivations, and the ASR piece fit an audience that could not or would not notice the difference. This is the specific charge that Turner’s Collins critique rests on, and it is sharper than a general accusation of hand-waving about emergence. Collins pretended to have deductive theories when he had identified correlations and drawn arrows. The tacit in his work, the trained perception that fills the gap between his macro claims and his micro observations, was presented as explicit theory. Turner found this a joke. It fit the audience.
This connects to Turner’s broader worry about what tacit competence claims do when they enter institutions. A convenient belief is maintained not through argument but through the formation that makes certain conclusions feel obvious to those inside a tradition and naive to those outside it. The enforcement operates below the level of conscious awareness. You do not experience it as enforcement. You experience it as simply seeing clearly what inadequately formed people cannot see. The economist formed in the dominant modeling tradition of 1970 to 2008 experienced the tradition’s blind spots as the natural boundaries of rigorous inquiry. The public health official trained in certain evidentiary standards experienced challenges to those standards as methodological naivety. The foreign policy professional formed in certain assumptions about state power experienced disconfirming evidence as reflecting inadequate understanding of how states actually work.
What looked from outside like institutional failure or motivated reasoning was from inside the experience of obvious professional judgment being applied by people who had been formed in their traditions. The convenient beliefs felt like knowledge. The formation made them feel that way.
Turner calls the mechanism by which communities enforce convenient beliefs on members who might otherwise question them epistemic coercion. It operates not by threatening punishment for disbelief but by controlling access to the formation that makes belief feel natural. If you want to participate in the community you undergo the formation. The formation shapes what questions feel worth asking, what evidence feels compelling, what conclusions feel forced. By the time the formation is complete, the community’s convenient beliefs feel like the natural outputs of honest inquiry. Those who challenge from outside are designated as lacking adequate formation. Those who challenge from inside face the full weight of social enforcement mechanisms that make deviation feel like professional failure.
This is why Turner’s framework generates no simple remedy. The problem is not primarily dishonesty or conscious motivated reasoning. It is the systematic confusion, unavoidable from inside any formation, between the knowledge the formation transmits and the convenient beliefs it enforces. His proceduralism, developed with George Mazur in Making Democratic Theory Democratic, is his partial answer: not eliminating the confusion but creating institutional arrangements that make its enforcement harder to sustain invisibly. Transparent procedures, accountable mechanisms, principal-agent structures that acknowledge rather than conceal the exercise of discretionary power: these do not solve the problem of convenient belief but they make the solving of it more tractable by forcing authority claims into forms that can be contested by those outside the formation.
The deeper implication Turner draws, most fully in his recent work on epistemic coercion and the governance of information environments, is that modern societies have failed to develop adequate mechanisms for distinguishing between knowledge that formation transmits and convenient belief that formation enforces. The language of expertise and professional formation is available to any coalition that achieves sufficient institutional control to enforce its formation on those seeking access to the relevant professional community. Once that control is achieved, the coalition’s convenient beliefs become the field’s professional standards, maintained through formation that makes them feel like the natural conclusions of expertise. The failure is not incidental to how expert authority works in liberal democracies. It is structural.
This is a disturbing conclusion but not a nihilistic one. Turner does not say all expertise is fraudulent or all professional formation is coalition maintenance. He says we cannot reliably distinguish from inside any formation between the knowledge it transmits and the convenient beliefs it enforces, and that the social enforcement mechanisms producing behavioral conformity are more powerful and more invisible than we acknowledge. The physician who has spent years developing diagnostic formation knows things patients do not know, and that knowledge justifies real deference. The physician who has also absorbed tacit beliefs about which complaints deserve serious investigation and which financial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies feel obviously appropriate is operating in a domain where formation and convenient belief are indistinguishable from the inside.
What Turner gives us is a framework for understanding why institutional failures of the kind that characterize the early twenty-first century look the way they do. Not as betrayals by bad actors, though bad actors exist. As the predictable output of formation processes that make convenient beliefs feel like knowledge to those inside them, invisible to detection from within, resistant to challenge from without, and sustained by selection mechanisms that ensure that those who cannot be formed to feel the convenient beliefs as obvious do not survive long enough to accumulate the authority to challenge them.
That is a hard problem. Turner’s value is that he refuses to make it seem easier than it is.
Turner argues that we have no direct access to other people’s mental states. We observe behavior and we infer that the mental states producing that behavior are similar to the mental states that produce our own similar behavior. This is a reasonable inference in many cases and wrong in others, and we cannot reliably tell the difference from the outside. What looks like shared tacit knowledge, a community of people who respond to situations in coordinated ways without explicit agreement or coordination, might be explained by shared mental formations, or it might be explained by convergent responses to shared external environments, by similar training that produced similar explicit habits rather than shared tacit structures, by social enforcement mechanisms that punish deviation without transmitting any mental content at all, or by some combination of these. Turner argues we cannot distinguish between these explanations from behavioral evidence alone, and that the assumption of mental sharing is almost always doing more work than it can do.
This matters for how we understand tradition and authority.
Consider the English common law tradition. Lawyers and judges trained in this tradition are said to share a tacit formation, a feel for legal reasoning that cannot be completely codified but that is recognizable in practice, that distinguishes someone formed in the tradition from someone who has merely read the rulebooks. American law schools spent generations debating whether this formation could be transmitted through academic study or whether it required the kind of apprenticeship in practice that the English Inns of Court had provided. The assumption underlying this debate was that there was something real to transmit, a shared formation that produced the characteristic feel of common law reasoning.
Turner would ask what we mean when we say this. If two judges trained in the common law tradition reach different conclusions about a hard case, and both can cite precedent and principle in support of their positions, what exactly is the shared tacit formation supposed to be? If the formation does not produce agreement on hard cases, in what sense is it shared? And if it does produce agreement on easy cases, is that agreement evidence of shared mental formation or simply evidence of shared explicit training in the same rulebooks? The assumption of shared tacit knowledge tends to dissolve under this kind of pressure into either explicit shared rules, which are not tacit at all, or social enforcement mechanisms that produce behavioral conformity without necessarily producing shared mental content.
This is Turner’s most important practical observation. What looks like a shared tradition transmitting formation across generations is often better described as a set of social enforcement mechanisms that produce behavioral conformity and designate certain behaviors as signs of formation while punishing deviation. The formation appears to be shared because those who deviate are excluded, and those who remain are the ones whose behavior was already compatible with the enforcement mechanisms. The appearance of shared formation is produced by selection rather than transmission.
Apply this to an academic discipline and the implications become uncomfortable.
Consider the discipline of economics in American universities from roughly 1970 to 2008. During this period, a specific set of modeling approaches, mathematical techniques, and theoretical commitments became so dominant that graduate training in economics at leading universities consisted almost entirely of being formed in this specific tradition. Students who could not or would not be formed in it did not survive the graduate training process. Those who survived became faculty members who trained the next generation in the same tradition. The discipline described this as the transmission of rigorous economic thinking, the formation of trained economists who possessed the tacit knowledge of what good economic reasoning looks like.
Turner might point out that what was happening was considerably more ambiguous. Some of what was transmitted was intellectual formation, real skills and insights that made trained economists better at certain kinds of analysis than untrained people. But much of what was transmitted was conformity to a specific set of modeling conventions that had achieved dominance for reasons that included intellectual merit and also included institutional path dependence, funding structures, the specific historical moment at which mathematical modeling became technically feasible, and the self-reinforcing dynamics of elite graduate program prestige. The tacit knowledge of what good economics looks like was in significant part the tacit knowledge of what the currently dominant coalition in American economics regarded as good economics, dressed in the language of universal professional standards.
The 2008 financial crisis revealed that the dominant tradition had systematic blind spots, that its tacit formation had made certain questions feel natural and others feel outside the scope of serious economic inquiry, and that these blind spots were not random but reflected the specific commitments of the tradition’s founding generation. The tacit knowledge turned out to be partly genuine and partly convenient belief enforced through professional socialization rather than transmitted through intellectual formation.
This is where Turner’s framework connects to his analysis of what he calls convenient beliefs and epistemic coercion, which are the most politically relevant aspects of his work.
A convenient belief is a belief that a community maintains not because the evidence supports it but because maintaining it serves the community’s interests. Turner notes that convenient beliefs are maintained not through argument and persuasion but through the tacit formation that makes certain beliefs feel true to those who have been formed in a particular tradition and obviously suspicious to those who have not. The enforcement of convenient beliefs through tacit formation is more powerful than explicit argument precisely because it operates below the level of conscious awareness. You do not experience the enforcement as enforcement. You experience it as simply seeing clearly what naive or inadequately formed people cannot see.
Epistemic coercion is the mechanism by which communities enforce their convenient beliefs on members who might otherwise question them. It operates not by threatening punishment for disbelief but by controlling access to the formation that makes belief feel natural. If you want to participate in the community, you undergo the formation. The formation shapes what questions feel worth asking, what evidence feels compelling, what conclusions feel obvious and what conclusions feel forced. By the time the formation is complete, the convenient beliefs feel like the natural conclusions of honest inquiry rather than like enforced conformity. Those who resist the formation are excluded from the community, and their exclusion is understood not as punishment for heterodoxy but as evidence of their inadequate formation.
Vivid examples are everywhere once you know what to look for.
Consider how medical residents are formed in the culture of a hospital department. The explicit training covers techniques, pharmacology, diagnostic protocols. But the tacit formation covers something different and in many ways more important. It covers what counts as a good physician, what the appropriate relationship to uncertainty is, how aggressively to intervene, when to tell patients difficult truths and when to soften them, what kinds of patients deserve what kinds of attention, how to relate to nurses and other staff, what it feels like to be the kind of doctor this department regards as excellent. This formation is transmitted not through explicit instruction but through exposure, through the reactions of senior physicians to residents’ decisions, through the stories that circulate about excellent and inadequate physicians, through the social rewards and penalties that shape behavior without ever being articulated as explicit rules.
Turner would note that this formation is valuable in some respects and a vehicle for convenient beliefs in others. The tacit sense of when a patient is sicker than their vital signs suggest is pattern recognition that cannot be fully articulated but that saves lives. The tacit sense that certain kinds of complaints from certain kinds of patients are less deserving of aggressive investigation, or that certain treatment approaches are obviously superior to alternatives that have not been adequately studied, or that certain kinds of outcomes count as success and others count as failure, these are more likely to be convenient beliefs maintained through formation than insights transmitted through apprenticeship. The formation makes them feel identical from the inside.
Consider how elite law firms form young associates. The explicit training covers legal research, brief writing, client communication. The tacit formation covers something considerably harder to articulate. It covers what a serious lawyer looks like, how to dress and speak and carry oneself, what kinds of arguments feel sophisticated and what kinds feel naive, how to relate to clients of different kinds, what counts as excellent work and what counts as adequate work, how much of your life the firm legitimately owns and how much is yours. This formation is transmitted through years of observation and social enforcement, through the reactions of partners to associates’ work product, through the cases that are assigned and withheld, through the social rituals of the firm that communicate constantly who belongs and who does not.
Turner’s framework predicts that this formation will contain transmission of real skills alongside the enforcement of convenient beliefs that serve the firm’s interests. The tacit sense of what a strong legal argument looks like is real. The tacit sense that certain clients deserve certain kinds of representation, that certain settlement figures are obviously reasonable, that certain regulatory interpretations are obviously correct, these are more likely convenient beliefs whose obviousness is produced by formation rather than evidence. The associates who are formed by the firm will experience these convenient beliefs as the natural conclusions of legal sophistication rather than as the interests of the firm’s coalition dressed in the language of professional standards.
Consider the formation of academic historians in the American historical profession from roughly 1960 to the present. The explicit training covers archival research, historiographical traditions, the conventions of historical argument. The tacit formation covers something more politically charged. It covers what historical questions feel important and what questions feel peripheral or naive, what kinds of evidence feel compelling and what kinds feel suspect, which historical actors deserve sympathy and which deserve criticism, what interpretive frameworks feel sophisticated and which feel outdated or ideologically compromised. This formation has shifted significantly over the period in question, and Turner’s framework predicts that the shifts reflect changes in the dominant coalition’s composition and interests rather than straightforward accumulation of historical insight.
That Noble Dream by Peter Novick documents that the historical profession’s commitment to objectivity as its central professional value was not simply the natural conclusion of honest inquiry into what historical knowledge requires. It was a convenient belief that served specific professional interests in specific historical circumstances, maintained through formation that made certain questions feel methodologically serious and others feel politically motivated. When the coalition composition of the historical profession shifted significantly in the 1960s and 1970s, the convenient beliefs shifted with it, and the new convenient beliefs were maintained through the same formation mechanisms as the old ones, with the same experience from the inside of obvious professional standards being applied rather than coalition interests being served.
The most politically important application of Turner’s framework is to what he calls the sociology of expertise and its relationship to democratic legitimacy.
Modern societies increasingly delegate decisions about important matters to experts who claim authority on the basis of their professional formation. The expert’s claim is that their formation has given them access to knowledge that laypeople do not have, and that this knowledge justifies their authority in their domain. Turner’s framework raises uncomfortable questions about this claim. If expert formation inevitably contains both transmission of real knowledge and enforcement of convenient beliefs that serve the expert community’s interests, how are laypeople supposed to distinguish between them? And if the formation process makes the convenient beliefs feel as obvious as the knowledge to those who have been formed, how are experts supposed to distinguish between them?
This is not an argument against expertise. Genuine formation produces knowledge that justifies real authority. The physician who has spent years developing diagnostic formation knows things that patients and administrators do not know, and that knowledge justifies real deference. But the physician who has been formed in a tradition that treats certain complaints as worthy of serious investigation and others as not, who has absorbed tacit beliefs about which treatment approaches are obviously superior, who has developed a professional formation that makes certain financial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies feel obviously appropriate, is operating in a domain where formation and convenient belief are indistinguishable from the inside and where the claim to expertise may be serving coalition interests more than it is serving patients.
Turner’s point is that democratic societies have failed to develop adequate mechanisms for making this distinction, and that the failure has significant political consequences. The language of expertise and professional formation is available to any coalition that can achieve sufficient institutional control to enforce its formation on those seeking access to the relevant professional community. Once that control is achieved, the coalition’s convenient beliefs become the professional standards of the field, maintained through formation that makes them feel like the natural conclusions of expertise. Those who challenge the convenient beliefs from outside the formation are designated as lacking the formation required to understand what they are criticizing. Those who challenge from inside face the full weight of the social enforcement mechanisms that make deviation from the formation feel like professional failure rather than intellectual honesty.
What Turner gives us is a framework for understanding why so many contemporary institutional failures look the way they do. The financial regulators who failed to anticipate the 2008 crisis had been formed in a tradition that made certain risks feel obviously manageable and certain regulatory approaches feel obviously adequate. The public health officials who initially resisted certain conclusions about the COVID pandemic had been formed in traditions that made certain kinds of evidence feel compelling and others feel methodologically suspect. The foreign policy establishment that repeatedly misread the consequences of military intervention had been formed in a tradition that made certain assumptions about state power and democratic transformation feel obviously correct.
In each case what looked from outside like simple institutional failure or even deliberate deception was from inside the experience of obviously correct professional judgment being applied by people who had been formed in their traditions. The convenient beliefs felt like knowledge. The formation made them feel that way. And Turner’s framework predicts that this will always be the case when a coalition achieves sufficient institutional control to enforce its formation on those seeking access to the relevant professional community.
This is a disturbing conclusion because it offers no simple remedy. The problem is not primarily dishonesty or even motivated reasoning in the conscious sense. It is the systematic confusion, unavoidable from inside any formation, between the knowledge that the formation transmits and the convenient beliefs that the formation enforces. Living with this confusion requires a specific kind of intellectual humility that no formation naturally produces, because every formation, by definition, makes its own conclusions feel like the natural output of honest inquiry rather than like the contingent product of a specific historical coalition’s institutional success.
Turner’s framework does not tell us that all expertise is fraudulent or that all professional formation is merely coalition maintenance. It tells us that we cannot reliably distinguish from inside any formation between the knowledge it transmits and the convenient beliefs it enforces, and that the social enforcement mechanisms that produce behavioral conformity are more powerful and more invisible than we acknowledge. This makes the question of how democratic societies should relate to expert authority considerably harder than either the naive deference to expertise or the naive rejection of it that dominate current political discourse. It is a hard problem, and Turner’s framework is valuable precisely because it refuses to make it seem easier than it is.