Stephen Turner’s critique of tacit knowledge is primarily epistemological and sociological. He is concerned with the impossibility of collective transmission, with the ideological functions of tacit knowledge claims, and with the way appeals to shared background naturalize what are contested social arrangements. His target is the sociological tradition, Wittgenstein on rule-following, Polanyi on personal knowledge, the practice theorists from Bourdieu onward, and his argument is that they all presuppose a transmission of background that cannot occur in the way they describe. But when he asks what is happening when people seem to share a practice or a sensibility, his answer stays at the level of explicit learning, socialization, repeated exposure, and individual habit formation.
His forthcoming work moves closer to the gap. There he confronts what he calls causal blending: the fact that outcomes in social and cognitive life are produced by multiple overlapping causes, genetic, developmental, experiential, and situational, that cannot be cleanly separated. He acknowledges the bias against biological reductionism in social science and works around it carefully, which itself tells you something. The taboo is real enough that a philosopher of his range and candor handles the territory with deliberate indirection. He cites Turkheimer’s three laws of behavioral genetics and their implication that psychological traits show substantial heritability, that shared family environment contributes less than genes, and that much variance comes from non-shared experience. He treats this not as a settled answer but as a constraint on what any adequate causal account must accommodate.
That framing is useful but leaves a significant gap in the tacit knowledge argument. The reason a skilled literary reader cannot fully articulate what he perceives and transmit it through explicit instruction may not be only that the knowledge is ineffable or that the social conditions for transmission have eroded. It may partly be that what he is perceiving depends on cognitive and perceptual capacities that vary across individuals for reasons that have nothing to do with training or socialization. Robert Alter’s ear for Hebrew rhythm may be inseparable from capacities that no amount of formation can fully install in someone who does not already have the underlying architecture.
Turner is aware in a general way that individuals differ and that not everyone can be trained to the same level of competence in any domain. His new work acknowledges psychic heterogeneity explicitly and treats the variable brain as central rather than incidental. But his framework remains committed to a broadly social constructionist account of competence formation even as it dismantles the social constructionist account of tacit knowledge transmission. That combination creates a tension he does not fully resolve. He describes causal blending as the key to understanding how genetic, developmental, and social causes converge and interfere, but he does not press the genetic question into the specific domain of literary and aesthetic competence, which is where it would be most illuminating and most uncomfortable.
The behavioral genetics literature would push the question in productive directions. Heritability estimates for musical ability, language aptitude, various dimensions of aesthetic sensitivity, and the capacity to hold and manipulate complex syntactic structures are not negligible. Twin studies consistently find substantial genetic contributions to cognitive and perceptual abilities directly relevant to the kind of literary competence Alter exemplifies. If literary sensitivity has a heritable component, then the guild structure of humanistic training, where the master’s perceptions are validated by appeal to shared formation, conceals something important about why some people end up with the relevant capacities and others do not. The formation story is not false, but it is incomplete in a way that has real consequences for how we understand both the authority of critics and the limits of that authority’s transmissibility.
Turner’s concept of substitutability, multiple paths to the same cognitive outcome, partially addresses this. Different individuals with different cognitive architectures might arrive at similar competences through different routes. But substitutability cuts the other way as well: some people may find no available path to certain competences because the underlying architecture that any path requires is simply absent. This is the dimension Turner acknowledges in general terms through psychic heterogeneity and causal blending but does not follow into the literary domain.
The reason is partly disciplinary. Turner works primarily with philosophers and sociologists rather than behavioral geneticists or evolutionary psychologists, and the genetic question does not appear on the map of debates he navigates. But it is also partly the taboo he names directly in his forthcoming book. Charges of racism attach quickly to any argument that links heritable individual variation to differential competence, even when the argument says nothing about group averages and concerns only the individual variation that Turner’s own framework already treats as central. The indirection he practices is intellectually costly. It produces a framework that acknowledges causal blending as a principle while leaving one of its most significant components underspecified in the domains where it most matters.
There is also the question of what behavioral genetics implies for Turner’s core claim about the impossibility of collective tacit knowledge. If individuals share not just a social environment but a biological architecture, some of what looks like shared tacit perception may rest on a common substrate, not socially transmitted but genetically instantiated. This does not rescue the Wittgensteinian or Polanyian accounts that Turner criticizes, because those accounts make strong claims about social transmission that the genetic angle does not support. But it suggests that the impossibility of collective tacit knowledge may be less absolute than Turner’s argument implies. People who share relevant genetic architecture may share perceptual capacities in a way that is not reducible to shared socialization and is not merely the ideological function of appealing to common background.
The Alter case is a particularly important test because what makes him exceptional is not straightforwardly separable into what his formation gave him and what he arrived with. The twenty-two years of solitary translation required both. Turner’s framework, for all its power in exposing the ideological functions of tacit knowledge claims, cannot fully account for why one scholar could do what Alter did and most others could not, even with equivalent training and equivalent access to the relevant texts. His new work on causal blending and psychic heterogeneity moves toward that question without quite reaching it.
Turner throwing caution to the wind would not look like a conversion to hereditarianism. It would look like the logical extension of arguments he already makes, pushed past the point where professional caution currently stops him.
The first move would be to take the substitutability argument and run it in both directions simultaneously. He currently uses substitutability to dissolve strong claims about shared tacit knowledge: different people reach similar competences through different routes, which means the competence is not evidence of shared transmission. But substitutability has a harder implication he does not press. If there are multiple paths to a given cognitive outcome, the question becomes which people can access which paths, and why. Some paths require underlying capacities that training can develop but cannot install. Turner already says this in general terms. The bolder move is to say it specifically: that the distribution of people who can access the paths relevant to high literary competence, or mathematical intuition, or musical discrimination, is not random, and that the non-randomness has a partly genetic explanation that socialization accounts cannot capture.
The second move would be to take his treatment of Weber’s Protestant Ethic argument and press the genetic question into it directly. Turner reconstructs the Ethic as a scaffolding process: the theology creates affordances that transform capacities, which create new affordances, and so on. He treats the starting capacities as given. But Weber’s argument has always had a puzzle at its center. Why did the specific populations that produced and sustained intense Calvinist practice show particular cognitive and behavioral profiles? Turner gestures at this through his discussion of how sustained cultural formation might select for certain capacities over time. The bolder version would follow Gregory Cochran’s logic, without necessarily endorsing his specific conclusions, and ask whether intensive text-based religious cultures maintained across many generations leave any trace in the gene pools that carried them. Not as a claim about superiority but as a claim about fit: the capacities a particular cultural formation rewards might, over sufficient time, become partially heritable in the populations that maintained it most intensively.
The third move would be to engage directly with Robert Plomin’s (b. 1948)) work on gene-environment correlation, which Turner cites through Turkheimer but does not develop. Plomin’s finding that environments are partly selected and created by genotypes over time is directly relevant to the transmission problem. If the environments that produce tacit literary or aesthetic competence are partly chosen by people with the relevant genetic predispositions, then the standard socialization account conflates cause and effect. The formation story describes a real process but misidentifies what is doing the primary causal work. Turner’s causal blending framework is perfectly suited to accommodate this without collapsing into genetic determinism. The bolder version would say so explicitly: that in domains requiring high aesthetic or symbolic competence, the genetic and environmental contributions are so intertwined that treating formation as the primary explanation is a category error, one that the humanistic guild perpetuates because it serves their institutional interest in the transmissibility of their own authority.
The fourth and sharpest move would be to turn the tacit knowledge argument back on the academy itself. Turner already argues that appeals to tacit knowledge function ideologically, naturalizing what are contested social arrangements. The bolder version applies this to the contemporary university’s commitment to demographic representation as the primary criterion for selection into humanistic training. If the relevant competences are substantially heritable and unevenly distributed, then selection criteria oriented toward demographic representation rather than individual capacity will systematically reduce the pool of people capable of receiving and carrying forward the tacit knowledge that defines the practice. Turner could say this without making any claim about which groups have more or less of the relevant capacities, because the argument holds at the level of individual variation regardless of group averages. The point is that any selection criterion other than individual capacity for the relevant competences will degrade the transmission of those competences over time, and that the degradation will be masked by the very ideological function that tacit knowledge claims perform, the appearance of shared background concealing the distribution of real competences.
The fifth move would be the most philosophically interesting. Turner’s causal blending framework acknowledges that genetic, developmental, experiential, and situational causes converge and interfere in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. The bolder version would use this to dissolve the political charge that attaches to genetic arguments in this domain. The charge assumes that identifying a genetic contribution to competence distribution implies determinism, group essentialism, or the futility of formation. Turner’s own framework shows why none of those implications follow. Causal blending means that genetic predispositions are neither sufficient nor fixed. They set conditions of possibility rather than outcomes. Formation can substantially enhance capacities where the underlying architecture is present. The practical implication is not that training is useless but that selection for training should identify individual capacity rather than treat demographic representation as a proxy for it.
What Turner would find intellectually if he pressed this far is that the argument strengthens his core critique of the practice theorists rather than contradicting it. Bourdieu’s habitus, Polanyi’s personal knowledge, Wittgenstein on rule-following: all of these presuppose that what matters is the social formation of competence. Turner has always argued they are wrong about transmission. The genetic angle shows they are wrong about origins as well. The competence that looks like the product of the right education, the right milieu, the right apprenticeship, is partly the product of capacities the person brought to that formation. The formation gets credit for what the individual’s architecture made possible. That is not an argument against formation. It is an argument for honesty about what formation can and cannot do, and for selection criteria that identify who can benefit from it rather than assuming the benefit is uniformly available.
What stops Turner is not intellectual incapacity. He has the tools. It is the professional cost, which he names honestly. The charges of racism attach regardless of the precision of the argument, and a philosopher working in a university cannot absorb those charges without institutional damage. The indirection he practices is a rational response to an irrational taboo structure. The essay he would write if the taboo were lifted would not be a polemic. It would be a careful, heavily qualified extension of arguments he already makes, pushed past the point where caution currently stops him. It would be recognizable as Turner. It would just be Turner with the last two moves of the argument included rather than gestured at and withdrawn.
