Relational Tacit Knowledge
Relational tacit knowledge is the first of Collins's three species. It is knowledge that individuals possess but have not made explicit — the recipe grandmother never wrote down, the machining tolerances a factory worker knows from decades of practice but has never documented. The knowledge exists in explicit-capable form inside the practitioner's mind; the barrier to articulation is practical, not principled. Given sufficient motivation and a patient interviewer, it could be extracted and formalized. This is the species that large language models absorb most naturally — training on corpora effectively performs the extraction a patient interviewer would perform, at a scale no human effort could match.
In the AI Story
Collins's framework treats the relational species as a genuine achievement ground for AI. When a model is trained on machining forums, cooking blogs, medical case reports, and professional discussion threads, it ingests vast quantities of knowledge that individual practitioners possessed but had not previously formalized. The training process aggregates the textual traces of thousands of practitioners' experience and synthesizes them into statistical representations that can reproduce the knowledge with impressive fidelity. The relationally tacit is being made computationally explicit at an unprecedented rate.
The importance of distinguishing this species from collective tacit knowledge is that it clarifies what AI progress actually achieves. Critics who dismiss AI as 'just pattern matching' miss the genuine sociological accomplishment: the extraction of knowledge that was previously locked in individual heads and diffused across unstructured text is a real expansion of accessible expertise. Defenders who claim AI will master all tacit knowledge conflate the species and miss the structural barrier that collective tacit knowledge represents. The relational species is computable. The collective species is not. The confusion of the two is the central analytical error of the AI discourse.
Origin
Collins introduced the tripartite taxonomy in papers published in the 2000s and consolidated it in Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (2010). The 'relational' label reflects Collins's view that this species is tacit because of the contingent relations between a practitioner and the social environment in which she works — not because of any intrinsic barrier to articulation.
Key Ideas
Contingently tacit. Nothing in principle prevents articulation; the knowledge is tacit because no one has bothered to formalize it.
Computationally tractable. Training on large corpora effectively extracts relationally tacit knowledge at scale.
The genuine AI achievement. What LLMs do well is make the relationally tacit computationally explicit — a real and historically unprecedented capability.
Not the hard case. Mastery of relational tacit knowledge does not entail mastery of the harder species, particularly collective tacit knowledge.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
- Harry Collins, 'What is Tacit Knowledge?' in Knowing as Instinct (2010)