Rethinking Expertise (review)

By parsing the difference between “talking the talk” and “walking the walk”—in their terms, between “interactional” and “contributory” expertise— Harry Collins and Robert Evans aim “to help us make decisions about who counts as an expert and who does not in . . . technological disputes in the public domain” (p. 133). Collins here steps away from his formidable and formative presence as a relativist in the sociology of scientific knowledge in search of firm and defensible boundaries between those who possess trustworthy expertise amid the daunting uncertainties of public policy decision-making and those whose inexpert input will only deepen the mire. He and Evans advance into this liminal territory through a multistaged assault, progressing through excising logical extensions in the manner of philosophers, eschewing the inconvenient but potentially germane complexities posited by those who linger amid the thorny thickets of case studies.

Collins’s preferred study site has always been the laboratory, and the lessons learned there about how to test and validate hypotheses persist in the methods deployed here, bristling with self-conscious rigor, the results reported in daunting clutches of neologisms and clusters of Venn diagrams. His earlier work built richly on Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge, recently compellingly elaborated in studies by Francisco Varela and Mark Johnson as enactive cognition, as knowing that originates in doing. Accepting that tacit awareness can be honed beyond the lab, here Collins and Evans grant contributory expertise to, for example, Brian Wynne’s shepherds insofar as their local expertise derives from local discriminations sharpened by “walking the walk” over fields embodied by long habituation, and to AIDS activists of ACT UP, who were both willing to crack the books and situated to monitor at close hand how AZT altered the experience of those living with AIDS.

But between those who do and observe close to hand, and those who share senses of wonder by talking and reading, they draw a firm line. There may be some backstory here, for their chapter on “interactional expertise and embodiment” carries the over-determined whiff of a rant directed toward Hubert Dreyfus. Insofar as they specify the issue, it is that “Dreyfus concentrates on the individual while we treat the location of expertise as the social group” (p. 78). Insofar as what the social group shares is language, they concede to the readers and talkers only the possibility of “minimal embodiment” (p. 90), and in a series of narrowly circumscribed and vexingly arcane tests on color blindness, perfect pitch, and gravitational waves, they claim to arrive at the brink of isolating “quite subtle differences” between knowing which arises from linguistic socialization and expertise derived from experience. With a good deal more fluency, Polanyi called this gap “what we know but cannot tell.” More recently, Mark Hansen has theorized this untellable as “experiential excess” (Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing [2000]). That there is a gap between the tacit and the narrower reach of the discursive is undeniable, but to refuse or infinitely defer the existence of some meaningful reflexivity between them, as Collins and Evans do in the end, surely is to discredit the contributions of too many peers who substantively inform our inquiries and usefully inflect their afterlife in the public domain.