An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous (...) other experts in forming expert judgment. Moreover, we have research collaborations where multiple scientists interact in a way that gives rise to distributed cognitive systems, which can act as a single informant. Accordingly, our concept of scientific expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate epistemic dependence and collective knowledge production. To this aim, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the concept of scientific expertise as informant reliability by building on the virtue-epistemological account of epistemic competences and theories of extended and distributed cognition. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, a scientific expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a scientific domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain they assert competently, honestly, and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an extended epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence, or to form supra-individual or group-informants that manifest collectively the kind of complex epistemic competence required for the investigation of certain research questions. (shrink)

Concerns about a “crisis of expertise” have been raised recently in both scholarship and public debate. This article asks why there is such a widespread perception that expertise is in crisis, and why this “crisis” has posed such a difficult puzzle for sociology to explain. It argues that what has been interpreted as a crisis is better understood as a transformation: the dissolution of a regime of expertise organized around practices of social integration, and its displacement by a new regime (...) organized around practices of expulsion. This article introduces a new framework that envisages expertise as an historically constituted phenomenon, which is the outcome of relational networks (which I call alliances). It argues that this approach, in which expertise(s) are understood as the historically contingent outcome of alliances between knowledge producers, problems, and modes of intervention, can better account for recent shifts. It does this by enabling us to reinterpret what has been described as a general crisis of expertise as, instead, the observed effects of the dissolution of specific alliances of knowledge and practice. This article demonstrates the power of this relational approach through two case studies: the dissolution of the expert alliances organized around the rehabilitative approach to crime and the counterinsurgency approach to irregular political violence. In each these cases, it finds that, as alliances of social expertise, characterized by policies and interventions that attempted to discipline problem actors and integrate them into society, unraveled, they were displaced by new alliances that sought to manage problems through practices of exclusion. The paper concludes with a theory of why the field of sociology has had such difficulty explaining the crisis of expertise. (shrink)

Against the background of an increasing dependency of governance on specialized expertise and growing calls for citizen participation, this study discusses solutions to the tension between knowledge and democracy. It asks: Which institutions and practices add to striking a balance between knowledge-based decision-making and the involvement of the affected? Based on the social studies of science, knowledge and expertise as well as democratic theory with a focus on participation, representation and inclusion, the study first identifies quality criteria of expertise and (...) participation, and then, with reference to two quite different, up-and-coming empirical answers to the epistemic-democratic tension, spells out the conditions of realizing these criteria in practice. In focus are a) highly complex, multi-layered structures of policy deliberation and advice that combine expert panels with a range of public input channels and b) the involvement of ‘lay experts’ into policy-making through participatory knowledge practices such as ‘service user involvement’ or ‘citizen science’. The study underlines, inter alia, how claims that transcend individual viewpoints and integrate a multiplicity of experiences and concerns are of particular democratic and epistemic value; it points to the key role of organized advocacy groups when it comes to credibly combining a mandate to speak for others with useful and reliable experience-based expertise; and it illustrates the relevance of conflict-minimising institutions for the making of public policies. (shrink)

Populist protests against Coronavirus-related restrictions in the US appear paradoxical in three respects. Populism is generally hostile to expertise, yet it has flourished at a moment when expertise has seemed more indispensable than ever. Populism thrives on crisis and indeed often depends on fabricating a sense of crisis, yet it has accused mainstream politicians and media of overblowing and even inventing the Corona crisis. Populism, finally, is ordinarily protectionist, yet it has turned anti-protectionist during the pandemic and challenged the allegedly (...) overprotective restrictions of the nanny-state. I address each apparent paradox in turn before speculating in conclusion about how populist distrust of expertise, antipathy to government regulation, and skepticism toward elite overprotectiveness may come together – in the context of intersecting medical, economic, political, and epistemic crises – in a potent and potentially dangerous mix. (shrink)

In this article we develop a pragmatist-inspired notion of intelligence that should lead to a better understanding of the notion of scientific expertise. The notion of intelligence is drawn from Dewey and is therefore used here in its technical sense. Our thesis is that scientific knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition for scientific expertise; intelligence should also be added. Conceived of as the capacity to apply general knowledge to particulars, we reach the conclusion that intelligence is a necessary (...) requirement for scientific experts in the wake of Dewey’s logic of inquiry. In particular, we argue that an all-important task that scientific experts are asked to accomplish, and which puts their expertise to the test, is to transform indeterminate situations into problematic situations, and that such a goal can only be achieved if scientific experts succeed in paying attention to all the contingent and precarious aspects that make the situation they face unique. (shrink)

This article examines a frequent assumption of sociological accounts of knowledge: the idea that knowledge acts. The performativity of knowledge claims is here analysed through the prism of ‘sociological excuses’: the idea that sociological explanations can act as ‘excuses’ for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. The article builds on Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects to discuss the relationship between sociological explanation, sociological justification and sociological critique. It argues that understanding how (and if) sociological explanations can act requires paying attention to (...) social and political conditions of performativity and their transformation in late liberalism. (shrink)

This article provides an explanation for how increased public participation can paradoxically translate into limited democratic decision-making in urban settings. Recent sociological research shows how governments can control participatory forums to restrict the distribution of resources to poor neighborhoods or to advance private land development interests. Yet such explanations cannot account for the decoupling of participation from democratic decision-making in the case of planning for climate change, which expands the substantive topics and public funding decisions that involve urban residents. Through (...) an in-depth case study of one of the largest coastal protection projects in the world and drawing on global scholarship on participation, this article narrates the social production of resistance to climate change infrastructure by showing how the state sidestepped public input and exercised authority through appeals to the rationality of technical expertise. After a lengthy participation process wherein participants reported satisfaction with how their input was included in designs, city officials switched decision-making styles and used expertise from engineers to render the publicly-supported plan unfeasible, while continuing to involve residents in the process. As a result, conflict arose between activists and public housing representatives, bitterly dividing the neighborhood over who could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the “frontline community.” By documenting the experience of participants in the process before and after the switch in decision-making styles, this article advances a sociological description of public influence in policy: The ability for participants in a planning process to recognize their own input reflected in finished plans. (shrink)

How can we make sense of numerous instances of experts in politics, law enforcement, national security, military defense, fire arms, public health, culture, and history working closely with creators of scripted television series in the USA today? Why do TV makers need them? Why and how do these experts come to Hollywood? In order to answer these questions, I carried out a Bourdieusian field analysis of contemporary American TV series production, with a focus on how knowledge about political and social (...) issues is produced and used in the TV industry. I identify four major expertise providers—the state, social movements, research organizations, and independent experts—and build a macro model of expertise exchange in the field of Hollywood TV. I argue that expertise in Hollywood is a form of capital which Hollywood professionals exchange for symbolic capital within the industry and in the field of power; it is also a form of capital that agents of the state, social movements, and research organizations exchange for symbolic capital in the field of power; and finally, independent experts trade their knowledge to accumulate economic and symbolic capital within the industry. This model is based on the analysis of data I collected during fieldwork in Los Angeles over 10 months in 2017–2019, which includes 159 interviews, 7 observation sessions, and archival materials. (shrink)