Expertise, fluency and social realism about professional knowledge

Abstract

In recent years, the sociology of education has seen a renewed interest in realist accounts of knowledge and its place in education. Inspired by ‘social realist’ thinking, a body of work has emerged that criticises the dominance of generic and process-based thinking about (especially) professional education and advocates instead a revaluation of discipline-based and theoretical knowledge. In this paper, I discuss the role of the concept of expertise in professional education. Following Winch, I situate the dominant theories of expertise in the field today as ‘fluency’ accounts of expertise – such theories focus more on the fluency or automaticity with which the expert acts than on the content of what the expert can do. As an alternative, I investigate Collins and Evans’s recent work on expertise in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Similar to what Collins and Evans suggests for science studies, I hold that education would benefit from consideration of the developing ‘third wave’ of thinking about the nature of expertise and I sketch the main features of a social realist view of the nature of expertise for professional education.

Keywords:

• expertise
• social realism
• knowledge
• professional education

Notes

1. Since Ryle, the philosophy of know-how has been dominated by the debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists about know-how. It is not so much philosophical anti-intellectualism that is being criticised here, but educational anti-intellectualism that rejects the importance of disciplinary knowledge in professional education.

2. For criticism of Collins and Evans’s approach, see Wynn (2003).

3. A – somewhat different – example would be of Collins’s own developed expertise in the field of gravitational wave physics. As a sociologist of science, Collins has studied the group of gravitational wave physicists for over 30 years. In this time, Collins argues, he has absorbed enough gravitational wave physics to interact with gravitational wave physicists on an expert level (the level of ‘interactional expertise’), even if he cannot actually contribute to physics. See Collins and Evans (2006).

4. In fairness, Collins and Evans do place much emphasis on learning from experience and the role of experience in making experts. However, Collins and Evans’s is not the trite story regarding experience: Collins and Evans emphasis the content of expertise – what a form of practical knowledge needs in order to count as an expertise is a content regarded by the population as being of use. Having rejected wave one thinking about the nature of expertise, Collins and Evans are not of the view that only credentialed scientists need to be taken seriously as experts simply because they are scientists. As the examples of the AIDS activists and Collins’s own work on gravitational wave physics (for instance) show, those without formal credentials can often take part as legitimate experts to a surprising extent. These points notwithstanding, expertise has to be seen as a real matter – as something possessed by some people but not by others – if one is to be in a position to avoid relativism and distinguish between experts and (mere) charlatans. What distinguishes Collins and Evans’s approach is that they see the necessity of the distinction between experts and non-experts, but that they seek to conduct a more open political debate about where the line between the two should be drawn.