Expertise
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Expertise
GIL EYAL
Abstract
The main claim of the essay is that expertise is better understood neither as a set of
skills that experts possess nor as a social attribution, but as a historically specific way
in which we currently talk about the intersection, articulation, and friction between
professions, science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics
on the other. It is shown that talk in terms of expertise is a fairly recent phenomenon,
and it is claimed that it reflects not the rise of the “expert society,” but its crisis,
namely, as long as it was fairly clear who the experts were, and how to recognize
them there was little discussion of expertise, but once the number of contenders for
expert status has increased and the bases for their claims have become more heterogeneous; once the struggles between these would-be experts intensified; expertise
became problematized because the question was how to determine whose claim is
legitimate. After surveying some of the current debates about the nature and character of expertise, the essay concludes by suggesting that the more fruitful approach is
to treat expertise in an open-ended nominalist manner as everything that is necessary
to take into account when one seeks to give a description of the capacity to accomplish a relevant task, that is, of everything that is necessary in order for a particular
expert statement or performance to be produced, repeated, and disseminated.
"The proper skill of expertise
Is to arrange the premises
So that the most foregone conclusion
Will fit therein without confusion.’’
(An old quatrain, quoted in Butler, 1946, p. 33, n. 68)
INTRODUCTION
It is not useful to start by trying to define “expertise,” because “expertise,” as
we shall see, is an essentially contested term. Different definitions or theories
of expertise apportion social worth to certain persons (deemed “experts”),
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Expert
Expertise
Professions
0.002600%
0.002400%
0.002200%
0.002000%
0.001800%
0.001600%
0.001400%
0.001200%
0.001000%
0.000800%
0.000600%
0.000400%
0.000200%
0.000000%
1840
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
Figure 1 Frequency of appearance of “expertise,” “expert,” and “professions” in
Google Books from 1800 to 2000.
statements, and performances, and withhold it from others. Consequently,
the very nature of expertise, what it is and what the term should mean is
a matter of struggle and disagreement. To circumvent this problem, it is
better to concentrate on pragmatics—how the term is used—and to take
into account the historical context of usage: When did talk about “expertise”
begin? In what context? Who was talking? For what purpose? Why was
the word useful in that situation, what did it do that other words could
not?
“Expertise,” it turns out, is a fairly recent word in the English language. As
can be seen in Figure 1, while talk about “professions” was fairly constant,
and discussion of “experts” accelerated in the period from 1880 to 1920, we
did not begin to talk about “expertise” in earnest before 1960.1 Indeed, the
word “expertise” did not exist in the English language before the late nineteenth century, when it was adopted from the French. (Earle, 1891) Expertise,
in fact, is so recent that Mandarin Chinese, while it has equivalents for “expert” and “skill,” does not yet have a word to translate “expertise” (Robert
Crease, personal communication).
1. Based on the data made available by Google Books Ngram Viewer. https://books.google.com/
ngrams/graph?content=expert%2Cexpertise%2C+professions&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&
corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cexpert%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cexpertise%
3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cprofessions%3B%2Cc0 (last accessed 12/18/2013).
Expertise
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CONTEXTS WHERE EXPERTISE WAS PROBLEMATIZED
There were several, partly overlapping, contexts in which the term “expertise” began to be used.
•
•
•
•
A legal debate arose in the 1930s and 1940s about whether certain
decisions of administrative agencies should be exempted from judicial
review because these agencies are “expert bodies which deal with specialized subject matters.” The term “expertise” was useful to articulate
this debate because the question to be decided was whether a collective
body that was not one of the recognized professions could be treated by
the courts with the same deference due to individual members of the
professions (Butler, 1946).
The legal literature about expert testimony. Especially from the 1960s
onwards, as the credibility and impartiality of the established professions was challenged, and as the vexing problem of assessing and managing risk emerged in tort litigation, it became less and less clear how
to decide whose testimony could be treated as expert opinion. The term
“expertise” was useful to indicate the new type of scrutiny exercised by
judges not only into the professional standing and recognition enjoyed
by the expert witnesses (“who is an expert?”), but into the content and
methodology of the knowledge claims they made (“what is expertise?”)
(Edmonds & Mercer, 2004; Golan, 2004; Jasanoff, 1995).
The literature and debate about artificial intelligence and “expert
systems.” The first attempts to construct “expert systems” in the
1970s consisted simply of “extracting” knowledge from experts and
transcribing it into software. The failures and limitations of this first
generation of expert systems led artificial intelligence (AI) researchers,
as well as computer scientists and psychologists, to investigate more
closely how experts work and think, and to develop general models of
expertise as consisting of rules or heuristics (Ericsson, 1996; Hoffman,
Feltovich, & Ford, 1997). In response, critics of AI developed an alternative account of expertise as consisting primarily of embodied skills and
tacit knowledge (Collins & Evans, 2007; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005).
The debate about the increasing role that science and technology play in
political decision making and public affairs (Habermas, 1970) has led to
a proliferation of literature from the 1970s onwards about the “politics
of expertise” (Benveniste, 1977), namely, about the role that experts play
in policy making and how to organize the relations between science and
democratic institutions. “Expertise” became a useful term with which
to designate the problematic interface between science and democratic
institutions, especially as politics have become increasingly dominated
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
•
by technically complex issues (global warming, inflation, GMOs) (Beck,
1992).
Finally, sociological studies of the challenges mounted by patients’ rights
groups, environmentalists, and other social movements and/or stakeholders to the scientific and professional monopoly over authoritative
knowledge and regulatory decisions, led to the coining of the phrase
“lay expertise,” and a debate about the significance of this phenomenon
(Epstein, 1995; Prior, 2003; Raberharisoa & Callon, 2004; Wynne, 1996).
There are clearly certain commonalities in how “expertise” was used and
what role the term played in all these different contexts where it emerged. To
put it simply, in almost all of these cases the resort to talking about “expertise”
was occasioned because it was no longer clear who were the experts: Could
government agencies be considered experts? Who should be recognized as
expert witnesses? How to make computers function as experts? What value
could be accorded to the interventions of laypeople? As long as it was fairly
clear who the experts were, and how to recognize them—namely, as long as
the established professions enjoyed relatively unchallenged authority—there
was little discussion of “expertise.” Once, however, the number of contenders
for expert status has increased and the bases for their claims have become
more heterogeneous, especially because of the legitimation crisis of the established professions; once the struggles between these would-be experts intensified; “expertise” became problematized and the word was bandied about,
because the question was how to determine whose claim is legitimate.
DEBATES ABOUT EXPERTISE
The main fault lines in the debates about the nature of expertise can be related
to this initial problematization. A key fault line runs between a realist or
“substantivist” position, according to which expertise is a real set of skills
and knowhow possessed by experts (Collins & Evans, 2007), as against a “relational” or “attributional” position, according to which expertise is a quality attributed to experts by significant others (other experts, accrediting and
licensing bodies, the public, the state) (Abbott, 1988). Obviously, there is an
important grain of truth in both positions. Every time we pick up the phone
to call a plumber, to use a simple example, we are acting on the intuitively
appealing theory that experts possess specialized skills and knowledge that
laypeople do not. On the other hand, if the plumber does not show up, and
we somehow manage to solve the problem ourselves, we do not consider
ourselves perforce to be experts or to possess expertise. Put more generally,
the possession of skills may be a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for the social attribution of expertise. Why then the debate? Why not
Expertise
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simply combine the two approaches or find some “middle way” between
them? (Hoffman et al., 1997). The main reason the debate is perpetuated is
because the relational position, as Collins and Evans (2007, pp. 1–15) argue,
offers no criteria of exclusion, no solution to the problem of where to limit
participation in decision making about technically complex public affairs.
And this “problem of extension” itself has been created as a response to
the legitimation crisis mentioned earlier: because science and the professions
are more involved than ever before in political decision making, they are no
longer trusted, and the way to regain this trust is by increasing public participation in technical decision making. But how far? In the highly politicized
matter of global warming, for example, should the claims of self-appointed
“lay experts” [or worse still, secretly corporate-funded “agnotologists” bent
on amplifying ambiguity and therefore ignorance (Proctor & Scheibinger,
2008)] be accorded the same weight as those of scientists? How to distinguish
true from false “climate experts” given that there is no single discipline, scientific specialization, or professional group with jurisdiction in the matter,
and given that decisions about global warming have immediate implications in terms of government distributive allocations and corporate interests?
This is why Collins and Evans (2007, pp. 1–15) insist on a realist position to
anchor a normative “knowledge science” that could meaningfully discriminate between claims to expertise. This is also why they introduce a distinction
between “contributory expertise” (the relatively rare “skills needed to perform a certain task with competence”) and “interactional expertise” (“the
ability to master the language of a specialist domain without actual practical
competence”), because only interactional expertise can legitimate the claims
of such normative knowledge science (or account of the empirical existence
of meaningful public participation in technical decision making). Obviously,
the debate is not resolved in this way because even if interactional experts
control the attribution of contributory expertise, how or who will control the
attribution of interactional expertise?
A different, although partly overlapping, debate is about the character
of expert knowledge: Is it composed of relatively general abstractions that
are articulable as rules or heuristics applicable to many different situations
(Abbott, 1988; Hoffman et al., 1997), or does it consist in an embodied and
tacit mastery of the details of practical circumstances? (Collins & Evans,
2007; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005). Once again, there is an important grain of
truth in both positions. Ever since Wittgenstein’s critique of the notion of
“following a rule” (to know how to follow a rule you need another rule,
and so on ad infinitum), it seems clear that any rule-like activity (such as
what experts do) can only be explained by reference to a background of
practices that are tacit and embodied (Dreyfus, 1979). To use an example
given by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005), what differentiates the expert driver
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
from the novice or the merely competent is not knowledge of the explicit
rules of how to drive (which they all possess), but the bodily automation and
schematization of these rules in order to attend to situational discrimination,
based on a large store of accumulated knowledge of specific aspects of
concrete situations. Yet, it seems equally clear that if expertise consisted of
purely embodied and tacit knowledge, then it could not inspire trust nor
command authority. If an expert witness about fingerprinting, for example,
answered under cross-questioning that he or she could not explain how
they arrived at a match, that they could not articulate a set of steps and
tests that others would follow in order to reliably arrive at the same result,
they would be laughed out of court. If it were not Collins and Evans (2007,
p. 17) claiming that expertise involves “an understanding of rules that
cannot be expressed,” but a doctor testifying in court, would we not be
suspicious? Nor could expertise consist purely in knowledge of practical,
concrete details, because it would then be vulnerable to being captured
and redescribed by another form of expertise, formulated at a higher level
of abstraction (Abbott, 1988), just as the practical expertise of the farmer
selecting seeds, for example, is redescribed and rendered obsolete by the
molecular geneticist operating at a higher level of abstraction. Why then the
debate? Why not simply say that expertise consists in some combination
of practical mastery and knowledge of abstract rules? The main reason the
debate is perpetuated is because at stake is the larger matter of “AI.” The
claim that expertise is a form of practical mastery is not only a descriptive
account of what experts do but also a spirited defense of human experts
against encroachments on their jurisdiction from expert systems, and more
generally an attempt to protect human capacities and competencies from
being captured and redescribed by the higher level of abstraction afforded
by the “cyber sciences.” Correspondingly, AI specialists admit that their
account of expertise as composed of rules, heuristics, and algorithms should
not be treated as “veridical simulation of human expertise,” but is part of a
more ambitious project in which AI is “evolv[ing] beyond the assumption
that intelligence in computers must have the human as its sole benchmark”
(Hoffman et al., 1997, p. 574).
A third debate is about the consequences of expertise: Do experts have a
profound influence on policy, making politics technocratic, distorting communication in the public sphere (Evans, 2002; Habermas, 1970) and performatively shaping social and economic processes? (Mackenzie, Muniesa, &
Siu, 2007); or, on the contrary, experts are relatively weak and compliant
playthings of politicians, governments, and corporations, and their supposedly “performative” formulas are often a cover and post hoc justification for
“politics as usual”? (Beneveniste, 1977; Mirowski & Nik-Kah, 2007). It goes
without saying that both positions contain an important grain of truth, and
Expertise
7
that the proper response would be to ask under what conditions, in what
context, are experts influential and expertise consequential? Yet, the debate
is perpetuated because at stake is the larger problem of the “phantom public”
(Dewey, 1927; Lippmann, 1927; Marres, 2005): given that modern-day politics are thoroughly suffused with complex technical issues about which the
public is ignorant, how is democracy founded on public opinion to be more
than an empty shell masking the rule of experts, or of their puppet masters?
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The upshot of demonstrating that, at bottom, debates about the nature of
expertise are inseparable from the contexts of problematization in which the
term emerged, is to suggest that expertise is better understood not as a thing,
not as a set of skills that experts possess, nor even as a set of claims and
attributions, but as a historically specific way in which we currently talk
about the intersection, articulation, and friction between professions, science
and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the
other. Talking in terms of “expertise” entails, first, a widening of the scope
of relevant claims beyond those made by experts duly recognized as members of legitimate professions. “Expertise” derives from the Latin experiri,
“to try.” The Latin verb became an English adjective—expert—in the fourteenth century, exactly at the same time as the closely related experience.
It meant simply that one is more experienced, “tried” (expertus; Williams,
1976, p. 129). Hence, when talking about expertise, one is necessarily taking
into account the claims not only of credentialed professionals but of all who
can claim practical experience in the matter at hand, including laypeople.
Moreover, because of its proximity to “experience,” the term “expertise” can
also be used in ways that detach it from association with a specific individual, as in the often-heard anticipatory mode in which government officials
or corporate leaders talk about the need to “develop expertise” in this or that
area. Hence, talking about expertise permits to take into account also collectives composed of various experts and laypeople (Callon, 2005), computer
systems, teams composed of computers and users (Collins, 1990), government agencies, think tanks, and so on. Second, talking in terms of “expertise”
entails a shift of attention away from the experts, their values, interests and
claims—as implied, for example, by the terms “profession” or “professionals,” which derive from the term for the vows or public declarations taken
upon entering a religious order—and onto the capacity to accomplish a relevant task better (and faster) than otherwise.
The way forward in studies of expertise is taken by analyses that—rather
than trying to locate expertise either in an individual or in a social
attribution; rather than defining expertise as either practical or abstract
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
knowledge—treat expertise in an open-ended nominalist manner as
everything that is necessary to take into account when one seeks to give
a description of the capacity to accomplish a relevant task, that is, of
everything that is necessary in order for a particular expert statement or
performance to be produced, repeated, and disseminated. Put differently,
if—as the substantivist approach emphasizes—any rule-like performance
is only explicable by reference to a “background of practices” that are
its “conditions of possibility” (Dreyfus, 1979), then a full explication of
expertise must explore indeed this background of practices and the social,
material, spatial, organizational, and conceptual arrangements that serve as
its conditions of possibility. This approach has been pioneered by Foucault
(1972, 1973) and underlies a great deal of the work in science studies,
especially actor-network theory (Cambrosio, Limoges, & Hoffman, 1992;
Keating & Cambrosio, 2003; Lakoff, 2005; Latour, 1987, 1999). AI researchers
have also become aware that “when studying expertise, the minimum unit
of analysis is the ‘expert-in-context’,” and this means that the description
of expertise cannot be separated from a description of the relevant tools,
training, social arrangements, and so on (Hoffman et al., 1997, pp. 552–553).
Clearly, a full account of the accomplishment of anything but the most
rudimentary task must include, at a minimum, also the tools and devices
used, as well as the trained ways in which they “withdraw” into embodied
habits (Latour, 1999; Schubert, 2011). Very likely, such a full account requires
also analyzing the contributions made by other experts, front-line workers,
perhaps even laypeople, and the mechanisms by which their cooperation
has been secured. A full account would include also the institutional and
spatial arrangements (including regulatory agencies and standards) that
foreground the problems that the task addresses, and make them observable
and actionable, as well as those arrangements that obscure them from view
or impede addressing them. Finally, the observations and interventions of
the experts are organized by means of certain concepts, and these too may
prove important when accounting for the way in which a problem is made
relevant or a task is executed (Eyal, 2013; Eyal, Hart, Onculer, Oren, & Rossi,
2010).
Especially useful are analyses of this complex makeup of expertise when
it is still “in the making,” while alternative devices, actors, concepts, and
arrangements are still viable candidates, and before it has been “black boxed”
and standardized. It is especially this process of “black boxing” and standardization that makes it appear as if expertise is fully embodied by the expert
(Cambrosio et al., 1992, pp. 347–349; Lakoff, 2005; Latour, 1987; Schubert,
2011).
This approach, in which expertise is treated a network or “assemblage,”
also allows to overcome the opposition between practical mastery and
Expertise
9
abstraction. Studies in this vein focus on a specific expert statement or
performance and trace the chain of “transcriptions” by which it is conveyed along the network toward its “centers of calculation” (Latour, 1987,
1999). Each link in the chain consists of altogether practical, concrete, and
embodied skills and forms of reasoning, yet each transcription means that
the statement/performance loses certain qualities it possessed before and
acquires new ones, until it gradually becomes mobile, combinable, and
“liquid” in the sense connoted by the term “abstraction” (Lakoff, 2005). This
approach, moreover, permits to make qualitative distinctions between different forms of abstraction, and thus different forms of expertise, according
to whether the chains of transcriptions are long or short; whether they can
be traced backward or not; what qualities are added and subtracted along
the way; how secure are the links, the transcriptions, from being taken apart
by challengers; what other actors, devices, and arrangements were involved
in constructing each link; and how their cooperation is secured (Eyal, 2013;
Latour, 2010).
Finally, this approach is also useful for rethinking the problem of the
consequences of expertise and the “phantom public.” Given the complex
and uncertain nature of the technical matters at the heart of contemporary
politics—their appearance as only partly knowable “risks” that can only
be managed, but not eliminated (think global warming)—any description
of the capacity to address them as expert tasks includes much more than
what any given group of experts has at its disposal. Put differently, not only
the “public” but the experts too are fairly ignorant about newly emerging
“matters of concern” that typically involve complex and unforeseen technical details. Thus, the “consequences of expertise” are not the elimination of
public discussion or the distortion of the public sphere, but the emergence
of new types of publics, provoked by and assembled around these “matters
of concern.” These collectives are typically composed of both stakeholders
acting as “lay experts,” as well as various other experts acting as advisers and/or collaborators. Neither group is in possession of the relevant
expertise, but together they seek to educate and equip themselves with the
necessary analyses, devices, tools, allies, and knowledge to address these
matters (Callon, 2005; Latour, 2005).
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Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic. London, England: Tavistock.
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Hoffman, R. R., Feltovich, P. J., & Ford, K. M. (1997). A general framework for conceiving of expertise and expert systems in context. In P. J. Feltovich, K. M. Ford & R.
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GIL EYAL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Gil Eyal is professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author
of (with Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natahsa Rossi) The
Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic (Polity Press, June
2010). [Winner: Merton Prize for Best book given by the Science, Knowledge
and Technology section of the American Sociological Association, 2012.];
The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); The Origins of Post-Communist
Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Break-up of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and (with Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor
12
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Townsley) Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite
Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London: Verso, 1998). He is
also the author, most recently, of “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social
Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp.
863–907. For a full CV and publication list, please see: http://sociology.
columbia.edu/node/65
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-
Expertise
GIL EYAL
Abstract
The main claim of the essay is that expertise is better understood neither as a set of
skills that experts possess nor as a social attribution, but as a historically specific way
in which we currently talk about the intersection, articulation, and friction between
professions, science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics
on the other. It is shown that talk in terms of expertise is a fairly recent phenomenon,
and it is claimed that it reflects not the rise of the “expert society,” but its crisis,
namely, as long as it was fairly clear who the experts were, and how to recognize
them there was little discussion of expertise, but once the number of contenders for
expert status has increased and the bases for their claims have become more heterogeneous; once the struggles between these would-be experts intensified; expertise
became problematized because the question was how to determine whose claim is
legitimate. After surveying some of the current debates about the nature and character of expertise, the essay concludes by suggesting that the more fruitful approach is
to treat expertise in an open-ended nominalist manner as everything that is necessary
to take into account when one seeks to give a description of the capacity to accomplish a relevant task, that is, of everything that is necessary in order for a particular
expert statement or performance to be produced, repeated, and disseminated.
"The proper skill of expertise
Is to arrange the premises
So that the most foregone conclusion
Will fit therein without confusion.’’
(An old quatrain, quoted in Butler, 1946, p. 33, n. 68)
INTRODUCTION
It is not useful to start by trying to define “expertise,” because “expertise,” as
we shall see, is an essentially contested term. Different definitions or theories
of expertise apportion social worth to certain persons (deemed “experts”),
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Expert
Expertise
Professions
0.002600%
0.002400%
0.002200%
0.002000%
0.001800%
0.001600%
0.001400%
0.001200%
0.001000%
0.000800%
0.000600%
0.000400%
0.000200%
0.000000%
1840
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
Figure 1 Frequency of appearance of “expertise,” “expert,” and “professions” in
Google Books from 1800 to 2000.
statements, and performances, and withhold it from others. Consequently,
the very nature of expertise, what it is and what the term should mean is
a matter of struggle and disagreement. To circumvent this problem, it is
better to concentrate on pragmatics—how the term is used—and to take
into account the historical context of usage: When did talk about “expertise”
begin? In what context? Who was talking? For what purpose? Why was
the word useful in that situation, what did it do that other words could
not?
“Expertise,” it turns out, is a fairly recent word in the English language. As
can be seen in Figure 1, while talk about “professions” was fairly constant,
and discussion of “experts” accelerated in the period from 1880 to 1920, we
did not begin to talk about “expertise” in earnest before 1960.1 Indeed, the
word “expertise” did not exist in the English language before the late nineteenth century, when it was adopted from the French. (Earle, 1891) Expertise,
in fact, is so recent that Mandarin Chinese, while it has equivalents for “expert” and “skill,” does not yet have a word to translate “expertise” (Robert
Crease, personal communication).
1. Based on the data made available by Google Books Ngram Viewer. https://books.google.com/
ngrams/graph?content=expert%2Cexpertise%2C+professions&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&
corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cexpert%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cexpertise%
3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cprofessions%3B%2Cc0 (last accessed 12/18/2013).
Expertise
3
CONTEXTS WHERE EXPERTISE WAS PROBLEMATIZED
There were several, partly overlapping, contexts in which the term “expertise” began to be used.
•
•
•
•
A legal debate arose in the 1930s and 1940s about whether certain
decisions of administrative agencies should be exempted from judicial
review because these agencies are “expert bodies which deal with specialized subject matters.” The term “expertise” was useful to articulate
this debate because the question to be decided was whether a collective
body that was not one of the recognized professions could be treated by
the courts with the same deference due to individual members of the
professions (Butler, 1946).
The legal literature about expert testimony. Especially from the 1960s
onwards, as the credibility and impartiality of the established professions was challenged, and as the vexing problem of assessing and managing risk emerged in tort litigation, it became less and less clear how
to decide whose testimony could be treated as expert opinion. The term
“expertise” was useful to indicate the new type of scrutiny exercised by
judges not only into the professional standing and recognition enjoyed
by the expert witnesses (“who is an expert?”), but into the content and
methodology of the knowledge claims they made (“what is expertise?”)
(Edmonds & Mercer, 2004; Golan, 2004; Jasanoff, 1995).
The literature and debate about artificial intelligence and “expert
systems.” The first attempts to construct “expert systems” in the
1970s consisted simply of “extracting” knowledge from experts and
transcribing it into software. The failures and limitations of this first
generation of expert systems led artificial intelligence (AI) researchers,
as well as computer scientists and psychologists, to investigate more
closely how experts work and think, and to develop general models of
expertise as consisting of rules or heuristics (Ericsson, 1996; Hoffman,
Feltovich, & Ford, 1997). In response, critics of AI developed an alternative account of expertise as consisting primarily of embodied skills and
tacit knowledge (Collins & Evans, 2007; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005).
The debate about the increasing role that science and technology play in
political decision making and public affairs (Habermas, 1970) has led to
a proliferation of literature from the 1970s onwards about the “politics
of expertise” (Benveniste, 1977), namely, about the role that experts play
in policy making and how to organize the relations between science and
democratic institutions. “Expertise” became a useful term with which
to designate the problematic interface between science and democratic
institutions, especially as politics have become increasingly dominated
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
•
by technically complex issues (global warming, inflation, GMOs) (Beck,
1992).
Finally, sociological studies of the challenges mounted by patients’ rights
groups, environmentalists, and other social movements and/or stakeholders to the scientific and professional monopoly over authoritative
knowledge and regulatory decisions, led to the coining of the phrase
“lay expertise,” and a debate about the significance of this phenomenon
(Epstein, 1995; Prior, 2003; Raberharisoa & Callon, 2004; Wynne, 1996).
There are clearly certain commonalities in how “expertise” was used and
what role the term played in all these different contexts where it emerged. To
put it simply, in almost all of these cases the resort to talking about “expertise”
was occasioned because it was no longer clear who were the experts: Could
government agencies be considered experts? Who should be recognized as
expert witnesses? How to make computers function as experts? What value
could be accorded to the interventions of laypeople? As long as it was fairly
clear who the experts were, and how to recognize them—namely, as long as
the established professions enjoyed relatively unchallenged authority—there
was little discussion of “expertise.” Once, however, the number of contenders
for expert status has increased and the bases for their claims have become
more heterogeneous, especially because of the legitimation crisis of the established professions; once the struggles between these would-be experts intensified; “expertise” became problematized and the word was bandied about,
because the question was how to determine whose claim is legitimate.
DEBATES ABOUT EXPERTISE
The main fault lines in the debates about the nature of expertise can be related
to this initial problematization. A key fault line runs between a realist or
“substantivist” position, according to which expertise is a real set of skills
and knowhow possessed by experts (Collins & Evans, 2007), as against a “relational” or “attributional” position, according to which expertise is a quality attributed to experts by significant others (other experts, accrediting and
licensing bodies, the public, the state) (Abbott, 1988). Obviously, there is an
important grain of truth in both positions. Every time we pick up the phone
to call a plumber, to use a simple example, we are acting on the intuitively
appealing theory that experts possess specialized skills and knowledge that
laypeople do not. On the other hand, if the plumber does not show up, and
we somehow manage to solve the problem ourselves, we do not consider
ourselves perforce to be experts or to possess expertise. Put more generally,
the possession of skills may be a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for the social attribution of expertise. Why then the debate? Why not
Expertise
5
simply combine the two approaches or find some “middle way” between
them? (Hoffman et al., 1997). The main reason the debate is perpetuated is
because the relational position, as Collins and Evans (2007, pp. 1–15) argue,
offers no criteria of exclusion, no solution to the problem of where to limit
participation in decision making about technically complex public affairs.
And this “problem of extension” itself has been created as a response to
the legitimation crisis mentioned earlier: because science and the professions
are more involved than ever before in political decision making, they are no
longer trusted, and the way to regain this trust is by increasing public participation in technical decision making. But how far? In the highly politicized
matter of global warming, for example, should the claims of self-appointed
“lay experts” [or worse still, secretly corporate-funded “agnotologists” bent
on amplifying ambiguity and therefore ignorance (Proctor & Scheibinger,
2008)] be accorded the same weight as those of scientists? How to distinguish
true from false “climate experts” given that there is no single discipline, scientific specialization, or professional group with jurisdiction in the matter,
and given that decisions about global warming have immediate implications in terms of government distributive allocations and corporate interests?
This is why Collins and Evans (2007, pp. 1–15) insist on a realist position to
anchor a normative “knowledge science” that could meaningfully discriminate between claims to expertise. This is also why they introduce a distinction
between “contributory expertise” (the relatively rare “skills needed to perform a certain task with competence”) and “interactional expertise” (“the
ability to master the language of a specialist domain without actual practical
competence”), because only interactional expertise can legitimate the claims
of such normative knowledge science (or account of the empirical existence
of meaningful public participation in technical decision making). Obviously,
the debate is not resolved in this way because even if interactional experts
control the attribution of contributory expertise, how or who will control the
attribution of interactional expertise?
A different, although partly overlapping, debate is about the character
of expert knowledge: Is it composed of relatively general abstractions that
are articulable as rules or heuristics applicable to many different situations
(Abbott, 1988; Hoffman et al., 1997), or does it consist in an embodied and
tacit mastery of the details of practical circumstances? (Collins & Evans,
2007; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005). Once again, there is an important grain of
truth in both positions. Ever since Wittgenstein’s critique of the notion of
“following a rule” (to know how to follow a rule you need another rule,
and so on ad infinitum), it seems clear that any rule-like activity (such as
what experts do) can only be explained by reference to a background of
practices that are tacit and embodied (Dreyfus, 1979). To use an example
given by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005), what differentiates the expert driver
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
from the novice or the merely competent is not knowledge of the explicit
rules of how to drive (which they all possess), but the bodily automation and
schematization of these rules in order to attend to situational discrimination,
based on a large store of accumulated knowledge of specific aspects of
concrete situations. Yet, it seems equally clear that if expertise consisted of
purely embodied and tacit knowledge, then it could not inspire trust nor
command authority. If an expert witness about fingerprinting, for example,
answered under cross-questioning that he or she could not explain how
they arrived at a match, that they could not articulate a set of steps and
tests that others would follow in order to reliably arrive at the same result,
they would be laughed out of court. If it were not Collins and Evans (2007,
p. 17) claiming that expertise involves “an understanding of rules that
cannot be expressed,” but a doctor testifying in court, would we not be
suspicious? Nor could expertise consist purely in knowledge of practical,
concrete details, because it would then be vulnerable to being captured
and redescribed by another form of expertise, formulated at a higher level
of abstraction (Abbott, 1988), just as the practical expertise of the farmer
selecting seeds, for example, is redescribed and rendered obsolete by the
molecular geneticist operating at a higher level of abstraction. Why then the
debate? Why not simply say that expertise consists in some combination
of practical mastery and knowledge of abstract rules? The main reason the
debate is perpetuated is because at stake is the larger matter of “AI.” The
claim that expertise is a form of practical mastery is not only a descriptive
account of what experts do but also a spirited defense of human experts
against encroachments on their jurisdiction from expert systems, and more
generally an attempt to protect human capacities and competencies from
being captured and redescribed by the higher level of abstraction afforded
by the “cyber sciences.” Correspondingly, AI specialists admit that their
account of expertise as composed of rules, heuristics, and algorithms should
not be treated as “veridical simulation of human expertise,” but is part of a
more ambitious project in which AI is “evolv[ing] beyond the assumption
that intelligence in computers must have the human as its sole benchmark”
(Hoffman et al., 1997, p. 574).
A third debate is about the consequences of expertise: Do experts have a
profound influence on policy, making politics technocratic, distorting communication in the public sphere (Evans, 2002; Habermas, 1970) and performatively shaping social and economic processes? (Mackenzie, Muniesa, &
Siu, 2007); or, on the contrary, experts are relatively weak and compliant
playthings of politicians, governments, and corporations, and their supposedly “performative” formulas are often a cover and post hoc justification for
“politics as usual”? (Beneveniste, 1977; Mirowski & Nik-Kah, 2007). It goes
without saying that both positions contain an important grain of truth, and
Expertise
7
that the proper response would be to ask under what conditions, in what
context, are experts influential and expertise consequential? Yet, the debate
is perpetuated because at stake is the larger problem of the “phantom public”
(Dewey, 1927; Lippmann, 1927; Marres, 2005): given that modern-day politics are thoroughly suffused with complex technical issues about which the
public is ignorant, how is democracy founded on public opinion to be more
than an empty shell masking the rule of experts, or of their puppet masters?
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The upshot of demonstrating that, at bottom, debates about the nature of
expertise are inseparable from the contexts of problematization in which the
term emerged, is to suggest that expertise is better understood not as a thing,
not as a set of skills that experts possess, nor even as a set of claims and
attributions, but as a historically specific way in which we currently talk
about the intersection, articulation, and friction between professions, science
and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the
other. Talking in terms of “expertise” entails, first, a widening of the scope
of relevant claims beyond those made by experts duly recognized as members of legitimate professions. “Expertise” derives from the Latin experiri,
“to try.” The Latin verb became an English adjective—expert—in the fourteenth century, exactly at the same time as the closely related experience.
It meant simply that one is more experienced, “tried” (expertus; Williams,
1976, p. 129). Hence, when talking about expertise, one is necessarily taking
into account the claims not only of credentialed professionals but of all who
can claim practical experience in the matter at hand, including laypeople.
Moreover, because of its proximity to “experience,” the term “expertise” can
also be used in ways that detach it from association with a specific individual, as in the often-heard anticipatory mode in which government officials
or corporate leaders talk about the need to “develop expertise” in this or that
area. Hence, talking about expertise permits to take into account also collectives composed of various experts and laypeople (Callon, 2005), computer
systems, teams composed of computers and users (Collins, 1990), government agencies, think tanks, and so on. Second, talking in terms of “expertise”
entails a shift of attention away from the experts, their values, interests and
claims—as implied, for example, by the terms “profession” or “professionals,” which derive from the term for the vows or public declarations taken
upon entering a religious order—and onto the capacity to accomplish a relevant task better (and faster) than otherwise.
The way forward in studies of expertise is taken by analyses that—rather
than trying to locate expertise either in an individual or in a social
attribution; rather than defining expertise as either practical or abstract
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
knowledge—treat expertise in an open-ended nominalist manner as
everything that is necessary to take into account when one seeks to give
a description of the capacity to accomplish a relevant task, that is, of
everything that is necessary in order for a particular expert statement or
performance to be produced, repeated, and disseminated. Put differently,
if—as the substantivist approach emphasizes—any rule-like performance
is only explicable by reference to a “background of practices” that are
its “conditions of possibility” (Dreyfus, 1979), then a full explication of
expertise must explore indeed this background of practices and the social,
material, spatial, organizational, and conceptual arrangements that serve as
its conditions of possibility. This approach has been pioneered by Foucault
(1972, 1973) and underlies a great deal of the work in science studies,
especially actor-network theory (Cambrosio, Limoges, & Hoffman, 1992;
Keating & Cambrosio, 2003; Lakoff, 2005; Latour, 1987, 1999). AI researchers
have also become aware that “when studying expertise, the minimum unit
of analysis is the ‘expert-in-context’,” and this means that the description
of expertise cannot be separated from a description of the relevant tools,
training, social arrangements, and so on (Hoffman et al., 1997, pp. 552–553).
Clearly, a full account of the accomplishment of anything but the most
rudimentary task must include, at a minimum, also the tools and devices
used, as well as the trained ways in which they “withdraw” into embodied
habits (Latour, 1999; Schubert, 2011). Very likely, such a full account requires
also analyzing the contributions made by other experts, front-line workers,
perhaps even laypeople, and the mechanisms by which their cooperation
has been secured. A full account would include also the institutional and
spatial arrangements (including regulatory agencies and standards) that
foreground the problems that the task addresses, and make them observable
and actionable, as well as those arrangements that obscure them from view
or impede addressing them. Finally, the observations and interventions of
the experts are organized by means of certain concepts, and these too may
prove important when accounting for the way in which a problem is made
relevant or a task is executed (Eyal, 2013; Eyal, Hart, Onculer, Oren, & Rossi,
2010).
Especially useful are analyses of this complex makeup of expertise when
it is still “in the making,” while alternative devices, actors, concepts, and
arrangements are still viable candidates, and before it has been “black boxed”
and standardized. It is especially this process of “black boxing” and standardization that makes it appear as if expertise is fully embodied by the expert
(Cambrosio et al., 1992, pp. 347–349; Lakoff, 2005; Latour, 1987; Schubert,
2011).
This approach, in which expertise is treated a network or “assemblage,”
also allows to overcome the opposition between practical mastery and
Expertise
9
abstraction. Studies in this vein focus on a specific expert statement or
performance and trace the chain of “transcriptions” by which it is conveyed along the network toward its “centers of calculation” (Latour, 1987,
1999). Each link in the chain consists of altogether practical, concrete, and
embodied skills and forms of reasoning, yet each transcription means that
the statement/performance loses certain qualities it possessed before and
acquires new ones, until it gradually becomes mobile, combinable, and
“liquid” in the sense connoted by the term “abstraction” (Lakoff, 2005). This
approach, moreover, permits to make qualitative distinctions between different forms of abstraction, and thus different forms of expertise, according
to whether the chains of transcriptions are long or short; whether they can
be traced backward or not; what qualities are added and subtracted along
the way; how secure are the links, the transcriptions, from being taken apart
by challengers; what other actors, devices, and arrangements were involved
in constructing each link; and how their cooperation is secured (Eyal, 2013;
Latour, 2010).
Finally, this approach is also useful for rethinking the problem of the
consequences of expertise and the “phantom public.” Given the complex
and uncertain nature of the technical matters at the heart of contemporary
politics—their appearance as only partly knowable “risks” that can only
be managed, but not eliminated (think global warming)—any description
of the capacity to address them as expert tasks includes much more than
what any given group of experts has at its disposal. Put differently, not only
the “public” but the experts too are fairly ignorant about newly emerging
“matters of concern” that typically involve complex and unforeseen technical details. Thus, the “consequences of expertise” are not the elimination of
public discussion or the distortion of the public sphere, but the emergence
of new types of publics, provoked by and assembled around these “matters
of concern.” These collectives are typically composed of both stakeholders
acting as “lay experts,” as well as various other experts acting as advisers and/or collaborators. Neither group is in possession of the relevant
expertise, but together they seek to educate and equip themselves with the
necessary analyses, devices, tools, allies, and knowledge to address these
matters (Callon, 2005; Latour, 2005).
REFERENCES
Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor.
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Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London, England: Sage.
Benveniste, G. (1977). The politics of expertise. San Francisco, CA: Boyd & Fraser.
Butler, W. J. (1946). The rising tide of expertise. Fordham Law Review, 15, 19–61.
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Callon, M. (2005). Disabled persons of all countries, unite! Latour & Weibel 2005,
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Cambrosio, A., Limoges, C., & Hoffman, E. (1992). Expertise as a network: A case
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and science, sports and games. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associaties.
Evans, J. H. (2002). Playing god? Human genetic engineering and the rationalization of
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Eyal, G., Hart, B., Onculer, E., Oren, N., & Rossi, N. (2010). The autism matrix: The
social origins of the autism epidemic. Cambridge, England: Polity.
Eyal, G. (2013). For a sociology of expertise: The social origins of the autism epidemic.
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Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic. London, England: Tavistock.
Golan, T. (2004). Laws of men and laws of nature: The history of scientific expert testimony
in England and America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, J. (1970). Technology and science as ideology. In Towards a rational society
(pp. 81–127). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hoffman, R. R., Feltovich, P. J., & Ford, K. M. (1997). A general framework for conceiving of expertise and expert systems in context. In P. J. Feltovich, K. M. Ford & R.
R. Hoffman (Eds.), Expertise in context (pp. 543–580). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society.
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Rabeharisoa, V., & Callon, M. (2004). Patients and scientists in French muscular dystrophy research. In S. Jasanoff (Ed.), States of knowledge: The co-production of science
and social order (pp. 142–160). London, England: Routledge.
Schubert, C. (2011). Making sure. A comparative micro-analysis of diagnostic instruments in medical practice. Social Science & Medicine, 73, 851–857.
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Wynne, B. (1996). Misunderstood misunderstandings: Social identities and the public uptake of science. In A. Irwin & B. Wynne (Eds.), Misunderstanding science?
The public reconstruction of science and technology (pp. 19–46). Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
GIL EYAL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Gil Eyal is professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author
of (with Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natahsa Rossi) The
Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic (Polity Press, June
2010). [Winner: Merton Prize for Best book given by the Science, Knowledge
and Technology section of the American Sociological Association, 2012.];
The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); The Origins of Post-Communist
Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Break-up of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and (with Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor
12
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Townsley) Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite
Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London: Verso, 1998). He is
also the author, most recently, of “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social
Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp.
863–907. For a full CV and publication list, please see: http://sociology.
columbia.edu/node/65
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