Kindle Notes & Highlights
Opinion, a pre-eminently social thing, is therefore a source of authority; and we can even speculate whether all authority is not the daughter of opinion. Some will object that science is often the combative antagonist of opinion, rectifying its errors. But science can succeed in this task only if it has sufficient authority and it can draw this authority only from opinion itself. All the scientific demonstrations in the world would have no influence if a people had no faith in science. Even today, if science happens to go against a strong current of public opinion, it risks losing its
...more
An expert is a specialist to whom one can put questions that he is unable to answer. Niklas Luhmann, quoted in Gotthard Bechmann, “The Rise and Crisis of Scientific Expertise,” in Niklas Luhmann and Imre Hronzsky, eds, Expertise and its Interfaces. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 2003 (p. 23)
agnoto-genic (i.e. ignorance-producing) trade
Ultimately, with the Trump Administration, the attacks on “phony experts” became a full-fledged “assault on science,” as declared by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS): the hostile takeover of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the gagging of its experts; the retreat from the Paris Climate accords; the decision by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt not to ban the pesticide Chlorpyrifos despite the contrary recommendation by the Agency's own Science Advisory Panel; the revoking or delaying of health and environmental protections based on scientific research (the Methane decision,
...more
Behind it all they see C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape gleefully chortling “I'm as good as you … is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies.”5 Far be it from me to minimize the role of resentment in history, yet in this case the diagnosis is not only partial but counter-productive.
“Many persons seem to suppose,” said John Dewey long ago, “that facts carry their meaning along with themselves on their face. Accumulate enough of them, and their interpretation stares out at you.” This is not the case. “No one is ever forced by just the collection of facts to accept a particular theory of their meaning, so long as one retains intact some other doctrine by which he can marshal them.” Moreover, when it comes to the issues at the heart of current debates, to call them “facts” is an abuse of language. They are estimates, models, predictions, forecasts, guidelines, points on a
...more
More than anything else, they are ways of assessing and managing uncertainty. To call them “facts” is to say that they are indisputably the case, but who of us could really check this for ourselves? The more general point is that facts – unlike their common image as “hard,” “brute” and “bare” – are precarious things that can exist only in carefully controlled environments. Only in the laboratory a fact is indisputably the case. To circulate freely in the public sphere it needs to be transformed into something else – an interpretation supported by rhetorical defenses, by the credibility of
...more
facts – unlike their common image as “hard,” “brute” and “bare” – are precarious things that can exist only in ca...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Invoking “science” conjures the whole history of dramatic confrontations between courageous truth and willful ignorance – from Galileo to the Scopes “monkey trial” – and leads to branding one's opponents “deniers.” Denial is resentment's daughter, a self-imposed refusal to look at what the light of science exposes. Yet, as science studies have shown, there is no single Science, nor a single “scientific method.”
Let me use the analogy of a three-lane highway to explain the significance of this distinction. The left, fast lane, belongs to law and policy. It is a fast lane – however much we complain that “the wheels of justice turn slowly” – because law and policy need to arrive at a decision about how to act. The right, slow lane, belongs to pure scientific research (of various kinds). It is slow not simply because it takes the long view, but fundamentally because it does not need to make a decision about how to act.
They cannot be revised (even if they are manifestly wrong), unless the whole cumbersome process of collective decision-making is set in motion again. This is because legal facts serve as the basis for decision and action, and because one needs to preserve the fragile stability of the whole framework of which they are but one node.
The middle lane of regulatory science is thus contentious and crisis-prone precisely because it serves as the interface between scientific research, law and policy.
To appeal to “Science” from the midst of this contention is to misrecognize that one is in the middle lane, at the seam of inevitable friction.11
The advantage of talking in terms of “expertise” rather than “science” is that this circle need not be composed only of scientists, and that we need not be overly attached to certain credentials, proper names and lines of demarcation. If certain laypersons possess relevant “experience-based expertise,” say Collins and Evans, then by all means they should have the public's ear. What distinguishes these people from others is not the possession of a credential,
To put it simply: when it is fairly clear who the experts are, and how to recognize them, there is little need for a word like “expertise,”
In short, from relying on the professions to vet the experts, the law has burdened judges with the task of evaluating expertise.12
How to draw the boundaries of legitimate debate, while guarding against domination by unelected experts and technocrats? While the main problematic was already formulated in debates in the 1920s, it has become more and more topical over time, and the boundaries of the debate have expanded from the narrow focus of social scientists and philosophers to involve politicians, social movements and the public at large. Increasingly, it has been discussed as the “politics of expertise.”
If talk about expertise is symptomatic, it is symptomatic not of the rise of post-industrial “knowledge society,” but of its crisis. Clearly, the common pattern is one of uncertainty about who the experts are: could
“Expertise” cannot be the standard to which we appeal in order to sort out legitimate from illegitimate interventions in public affairs, because the word comes to us congenitally infected with the perplexity surrounding these matters. “Expertise,” as was evident in the New Deal debate, is an “essentially contested” concept.
This should suffice to explain why I will refrain in this book from providing a straightforward and unambiguous definition of expertise. Put differently, considered historically and from the point of view of pragmatics, expertise is not a thing, not a set of skills possessed by an individual or even by a group, but a historically specific way of talking.
Talking in terms of “expertise” communicates the new and urgent need to find accepted ways of adjudicating whose claim is legitimate, when the old definitions and exclusions no longer work. It is a way of talking, finally, about the intersection, articulation and friction between science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the other.
Typically, we cannot directly compare the performances of the competing experts (I do not want to fix my pipes twice!). We resort, therefore, to comparing claims to expertise by means of socially recognized signs. This means that the victors, the recognized experts, may prevail for reasons other than their actual skills.
The realist approach has it backwards, these sociologists would say. It is not the expertise possessed by certain people that sets them apart as experts, but being recognized as experts qualifies what they do as “expertise.” I called the plumber because he is “certified” and “licensed,” namely, he belongs to some sort of trade association and thus possesses some legal guarantee of his skills issued by a licensing board. He came, mucked around a little bit, put in a new pipe and left. My pipes are still leaking and I am not at all certain he knew what he was doing.
This is why Niklas Luhmann says, as quoted in the epigraph to this book, that “an expert is a specialist to whom one can put questions that he is unable to answer.” Less cynically, the point is that we often speak of expertise in a promissory mode, not as something that exists but as something that needs to be developed.
These can be organized in a neat two-by-two table, on the basis of two disputes: first, is expertise inside or outside individuals? Second, is it practical, tacit, embodied, situational knowledge, or is it a body of general, explicit rules formulated at a high level of abstraction (AKA “theory”)? The two-by-two table
They thought that expert knowledge could be improved by encoding it in a computer program, because in this way it would become “explicit and public”: “Indeed, one of the most important results of this enterprise may be the development of ways to express formally, and to record systematically, knowledge that is usually unexpressed and unrecorded.” This is tantamount to saying what expertise should be – public, explicit, objective – rather than what it is. Put differently, when you scrape the thin coating of description and definition, what you discover underneath is something much more
...more
As Andrew Abbott argues: “Only a knowledge system governed by abstractions can redefine its problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers and seize new problems.” If one's expertise is tied to certain specific techniques, work processes or contexts (Abbott's example is the long-since defunct occupation of railway surgeons), one is liable to become obsolete when techniques change, new technologies are introduced, or other experts deploy abstractions to redefine what one does as merely one instance of a larger category of which they are in control. Expertise, thus, is doubly external to the
...more
within the collectivity. It makes nonsense to set
To paraphrase Dewey, they think in terms of a distributed phase and an assembled phase, between which “it makes nonsense to set up an antithesis.” They also show how the speed cards and speed bugs encode explicit rules and abstract formulae into the embodied practices of the pilot. ANT completes the mediation between abstract and practical knowledge by demonstrating how embodied practices are transcribed into abstractions.
The word “expertise” has evolved in order to chart the changes taking place in these relations, the emergence of new claims and new contenders, the transformations of trust and credibility, the changes in the conduits through which knowledge flows into the public sphere.
the analytical framework would also include conditions external to the expert – the socio-technical system of which the expert is but one part, the chains of transcriptions by which abstractions are generated, the disciplinary body of knowledge composed of such abstractions, the audiences who ratify, amplify, and redistribute expert statements
behind the realist meaning of expertise I discovered no such touchstone.
For those who conduct research on “trust in science,” however, the real question is not why do people mistrust experts, but why would they ever trust them to begin with? This is a valuable insight. Mistrust is not the puzzle. Trust, the “leap of faith,” is. By bemoaning the “assault on science” and the loss of trust in experts, we may be underestimating the problem of securing and keeping this trust to begin with.
trained judgment is inevitable in scientific work. The results of experiments and observational studies do not “speak for themselves,” but require expertise, honed by experience, to interpret and transform.
long-termism can feel a little bit like the Churchillian defense of democracy: “science is the worst form of organized inquiry, apart from all the others that have been tried.”
upwards of 80 percent of Americans, Europeans, and Britons think that academic scientists are socially responsible, can be trusted to follow the rules regulating their research, and are working to improve life for ordinary persons. Yet, if they are asked the same questions about “scientists working at private company laboratories,” these percentages decline as far down as 35 percent (regarding social responsibility) or hover around 60 percent.
As Hans Harbers puts it, “trust” is a de-differentiating concept. It links science and technology with politics, culture, consumption, medicine, ethics, and the law. Moreover, it blends together inextricably what people think about “a science-related topic of interest,”
The problem with the measurement of “public trust in science” is thus even more fundamental than the wording of questions or the framing of results. Who can blame the respondents if they seem inconsistent? Not only can they be easily forced into a particular position by the question's wording or the choices it offers, not only are they prompted to respond in pre-specified ways by “litmus test” questions, but they are being asked to make explicit what often exists only as a tacit implication of conduct (“trust”) – thereby transforming its very significance
some mistrust of whomever or whatever you trust is in fact the norm; trust and mistrust come packaged together. This ambiguity is at the core of all trust relations,
trust also depends – as I will argue below – not on mystical faith, but on framing operations that strike a delicate balance between contradictory social forces. This is why trust can so easily flip into its opposite, when this balance is upset.
