Rethinking Expertise

  • Harry Collins &
  • Robert Evans
University of Chicago Press: 2007. 160 pp. $37.50 9780226113609 | ISBN: 978-0-2261-1360-9

The modern world depends on experts and expertise. We use them all the time, without a second thought, in our personal and professional lives. Yet controversies over such matters as the causes of AIDS and global warming, and a growing public distrust of science, provoke scepticism about the abilities and agendas of so-called experts. According to Harry Collins and Robert Evans, the notion of expertise needs an overhaul.

The authors of Rethinking Expertise are both sociologists. Collins came across the topic during his 30-year study of scientists involved with gravitational waves, which culminated in his book Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves. He decided that the portrayal of experts as knowledge producers who pass on nuggets of truth to clients was woefully inadequate, a point he and Evans presented in a 2002 article reprinted in The Philosophy of Expertise (an anthology that I co-edited). Rethinking Expertise expands on that work, calling for “a new sociology of expertise”.

Collins and Evans argue that expertise does not involve passing on truths from producer to consumer, but takes the form of fallible judgements made in situations in which all the desired information is not available. This applies to scientific collaborations and governmental projects. “The speed of politics,” they write in a characteristically succinct and clever remark, “exceeds the speed of scientific consensus formation.” This leads them to defend their seemingly pedestrian conclusion that governments should rely on experts as “the best way to distil human experience of an uncertain world” — even when those experts have no final answers.

The authors needed to defend themselves. Some sociologists sharply attacked their 2002 article on the grounds that the technical and political phases of a controversy cannot be neatly separated, and that governments often use expert advice on technical questions (“Does activity X meet our standards for safety?”) to disguise political questions (“Should we do activity X?”). This problem is best met, critics contended, by expanding public involvement in technological decision-making, breaking down the boundaries between experts and laypeople.

Rethinking Expertise argues the reverse, namely that disguised political questions would be combated more effectively by a more rigorous understanding of whose technical expertise really should weigh in on technological decision-making. This is what Collins and Evans call the “problem of extension”, or “who is entitled to contribute to the technical component of a technological decision”. If an extension is too technocratic, it will foster distrust; if it is too broad, there is a risk of invoking 'technological populism', which means decisions could be overly influenced by politics or lifestyle choice.

The authors address the problem of extension by offering a “periodic table of expertise” — an attempt “to classify all the types of expertise that might be brought to bear on a technological problem”. These include about a dozen varieties, ranging from language-speaking skills to higher, domain-restricted categories. There is 'contributory' expertise from active practitioners of a field (the usual concept of an expert) and 'interactional' expertise, which involves fluency in a field in the absence of contribution. Sociologists and journalists have interactional expertise, and it is widespread in science (in which scientists must interact across disciplines), in management and in peer-reviewing.

Interactional expertise is one of the authors' most novel ideas. They dramatize it by reporting the results of several Turing-test-like imitation games. In one, judges could not distinguish between colour perceivers and colour-blind participants, probably because the latter had been immersed since birth in the language of colour and acquired the ability to pass as perceivers. In another, judges could not pick out Collins in a group of bona fide gravitational-wave researchers.

These results have startling implications. For instance, Evans has shown that minorities can acquire enough interactional expertise of mainstream culture to foil attempts to pick them out by questioning alone. This suggests that if minorities live by different values, it is not through ignorance but choice.

Collins and Evans put their points vividly, with elegant language and diagrams. They admit that there is more to technological decision-making than “sorting out the appropriate groups of experts” and that they are only addressing the technical phase of public controversies. They modestly claim to be only setting “the ball rolling”.

Their book starts to lay the groundwork for solving a critical problem — how to restore the force of technical scientific information in public controversies, without importing disguised political agendas.