Are Experts Right or are They Members of Expert Groups?

ABSTRACT

I describe an approach to the meaning of expertise that grows out of sociological approaches to the analysis of science such as ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’. This approach was introduced to counter certain political interpretations of the movement associated with that new perspective. Here, ‘Studies of Expertise and Experience’ is described and contrasted with standard philosophical and psychological approaches to expertise. It is suggested that it leads in new and interesting directions and suffers from fewer conceptual problems than these standard approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Expert knowledge
• sociology of expertise
• studies of expertise and experience

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Notes

1. See, for example, the five-stage model developed by Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; S. E. Dreyfus 2004), the stage model of Micheline Chi (2006), Alvin Goldman’s (1979) definition of expertise based on true and justified beliefs, e.g. 1979 or, for the 10,000-hour view, see Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993).

2. Collins and Evans (2002), Collins and Evans (2007). There are a disproportionate number of citations to Collins and the Cardiff University group in this paper because that is where most of the work has been done.

3. Though it leads to different conclusions regarding the relationship of science and society; see Collins and Evans (2002). Sociology of scientific knowledge began with Bloor’s discussion of the idea of symmetry in 1973 with the first empirical paper being Collins (1975). Collins assembles a number of empirical and philosophical contributions to SSK in his 1985/1992. Bloor's [1973] work was inspired by Wittgenstein’s (1953), and Collins’s by the same source having been introduced to it by Winch’s (1958), discussion of forms of life; the point being that this sociological approach has its roots deep in philosophy though not the kind of philosophy that finds terms such as ‘rational’ central to their work.

4. This approach is in sharp contrast to that of, say, Laudan (1983), who claims that the truth of true beliefs explain their acceptance and that the only kind of sociology of belief there can be is a sociology of error.

5. Michael Polanyi is usually credited with creating the term ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi 1966). For more recent treatments that grow out of studies of scientific knowledge, see (Collins 1974, 2010).

6. Evans (1999, 2014) for econometric modelling.

7. The locus classicus for the Turing Test is Turing (1950). For Imitation Games with the colour-blind, blind and those with perfect pitch, see Collins and Evans (2014); Collins et al. (2006), for the extent to which males and females understand each other, see Collins et al. (2017); Evans et al. (2018) under submission .

8. Jordan and Weston (2003).

9. Collins (2004, 2011); Collins and Evans (2015).

10. For example, Dreyfus (1967). Dreyfus was following Heidegger and especially Todes (2001) (the book is based on Todes’s PhD thesis which was completed much earlier – Todes and Dreyfus were fellow PhD students at Harvard).

11. Giles (2006) is the report of the first experiment in the scientific journal Nature. The report of the second experiment can be found in Collins (2017) Chapter 14.

12. LIGO stands for ‘Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Sanders’s explanation can be found in Collins and Sanders (2007).

13. A disappointing number of those who encounter the concept of interactional expertise think it is something to do with hoaxing (e.g. see Giles, 2006), or a thin pretence of expertise, often referring to it as mere ‘talking the talk’; it is very hard to overthrow a prejudice like this even in those who cite the primary sources.

14. Collins (2018) deals with this feature of the Turing Test at some length.

15. See Collins (2004), ‘Interactional Expertise as a third kind of knowledge’.

16. Adapted from Collins’s (2013).

17. Collins and Evans (2007).

18. E.g. Collins and Evans (2015), Collins, Evans, and Weinel 2015), Collins and Weinel (2011).

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Notes on contributors

Harry Collins

Harry Collins is Distinguished Research Professor and Directs the Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise and Science (KES) at Cardiff University, United Kingdom. He is Fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Bernal prize for social studies of science. His c25 books cover sociology of scientific knowledge, artificial intelligence, the nature of expertise, tacit knowledge, technology in sport, the Imitation Game, sociological methodology and the relationship of science and politics. He is also interested in fringe science, the philosophy of the collectivity and the relationship between face-to-face and remote communication.