What does it mean to be an expert? Traditionally, expertise has
been associated with authoritative knowledge, honed by practice and
certified by powerful institutions. Scientists, of course, are
often presumed to be the ultimate experts, but it is exactly in
this area that the importance of defining what it means to be an
expert is paramount. In "Rethinking Expertise," Harry Collins and
Robert Evans offer a radical new perspective on the role of
expertise in the practice of science and the public evaluation of
technology.
After setting out the problem of expertise in the context of modern
society, Collins and Evans present a Periodic Table of Expertises
based on the idea of tacit knowledge--in other words, knowledge
that we have but cannot explain. They then look at how some
expertises are used to judge others, how we judge between experts
even when we are not experts ourselves, and how credentials are
used to judge experts. A central new concept in the book and, the
authors argue, in society, is interactional expertise--a
proficiency in the language of a specialism if not in its
practices. Here, they describe experiments in which those with
interactional expertise succeed in pretending to be full-blown
experts in imitation games.
Throughout, Collins and Evans ask an important question: how can
the public make use of science and technology before there is
consensus in the scientific community? It is a quandary that has
wide implications for public policy and for those who seek to
understand science and benefit from it. The authors offer a
balanced assessment of the main issues and propose a new
understanding of how to extend public participation in technical
decision makingwithout abandoning the idea of expertise as real,
useful, and necessary.
Provocative and profound, "Rethinking Expertise "will be of keen
interest to scientists and scholars in science studies but will
also have implications for decision makers and experts across many
fields--in technology, education, sociology, psychology,
philosophy, computer engineering, and business.
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