The Semblance of Transparency: Expertise as Ideology and Practice in Science Studies

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University

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Abstract. Debates over the legitimate social role of scientists as experts, one of the old chestnuts of STS, have recently once again come to the fore with the promulgation of Harry Collins’ and Richard Evans’ call to arms to initiate a “third wave” of science studies. In this new era, the older campaign to assert the social constructedness of scientific knowledge is to be replaced a by recognition of the indispensable role played by experts in shaping social and political action, and Collins and Evans see their task as specifying how various kinds of legitimate expertise, both credentialed and uncredentialed, can be brought into fruitful dialogue around issues calling for solutions and action.

Collins’ and Evans’ program has been met with considerable resistance by various members of the STS community who accuse them of various kinds of revanchism and surrender to the dark forces of scientific credentialdom, to the detriment of the liberating potential of a truly critical sociological analysis of scientific knowledge. In this talk I will argue that both Collins and Evans and their opponents make a fundamental category mistake by collapsing two distinctly different forms of expertise into a single kind: One sort of expertise is based in the division of labor in society, and it concerns judgments made about who is appropriate for doing certain kinds of work. Accountants, bakers, midwives, mining engineers, geologists, and plumbers all exist as recognizable occupations because they possess skills that are not shared by everyone in society. This kind of expertise has very deep roots in history and is presumably universal in societies that recognize a division of labor. These are the experts toward whose practices it makes sense to talk about “trust” A second kind of expertise can represent knowledge of sciences such as climatology or Darwinian evolution as a public good, as knowledge that is in some sense “true” for all members of society, whether or not everyone in society can explicitly express those truths to themselves. This second kind of expertise is essentially ideological, and the ability of such claims to be accepted as true has little to do decisions made by individuals about whom to trust. In this talk, I want to discuss these two kinds of expertise and analyze in particular how their conflation creates a problem for understanding the role of scientifically credentialed experts in liberal democratic societies.