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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We live in times of increasing public distrust of the main institutions of modern society. Experts, including scientists, are suspected of working to hidden agendas or serving vested interests. The solution is usually seen as more public scrutiny and more control by democratic institutions experts must be subservient to social and political life. In this book, Harry Collins and Robert Evans take a radically different view. They argue that, rather than democracies needing to be protected from science, democratic societies need to learn how to value science in this new age of uncertainty. By emphasizing that science is a moral enterprise, guided by values that should matter to all, they show how science can support democracy without destroying it and propose a new institution The Owls that can mediate between science and society and improve technological decision-making for the benefit of all.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Part I Introduction
1 Science as a Moral Choice
The moral case for scientific values
Three Waves of science studies
Revelation versus proof
Structure of the book
Notes
Part II Elective Modernism
2 Choosing Science
Scientific values and the technical phase
The problem of demarcation
Formative aspirations of science
Formative aspirations taken from traditional philosophy of science
Formative aspirations from Mertonian sociology of science
Additional formative aspirations
Science as a logical machine and as a form of life
The hard case: defending science when it is ineffectual
Interim conclusion
Notes
3 Elective Modernism, Democracy and Science
Elective modernism’s reach
Elective modernism and the political phase
The new understanding of science: the owls
A new institution for policy advice
A problem that still needs a solution
Conclusion
Notes
Part III Academic Context
4 Elective Modernism in Context
Elective modernism and the second wave of science studies
Intellectual precursors and contemporaries
Notes
5 Institutional Innovations
Citizen panels, juries and consensus conferences
Constructive Technology Assessment
Citizen science
Public debates and consultations
Public engagement with science and technology
Experts as policy advisors
Conclusion
Notes
Part IV Manifesto
6 Elective Modernism and Democracy
Why bet on naïveté?
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Why Democracies Need Science
Harry Collins and Robert Evans
polity
Copyright © Harry Collins and Robert Evans 2017
The right of Harry Collins and Robert Evans to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0964-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Collins, H. M. (Harry M.), 1943- author. | Evans, Robert.Title: Why democracies need science / Harry Collins, Robert Evans. Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2016038437 (print) | LCCN 2016055612 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509509607 | ISBN 9781509509614 (pb) | ISBN 9781509509645 (Epub)Subjects: LCSH: Democracy and science. | Science--Political aspects. | Science and state.Classification: LCC JC423 .C6478 2017 (print) | LCC JC423 (ebook) | DDC 338.9/26--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038437
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
There are four parts to our argument. Part I introduces the problem, setting out the main issues as we see them, and describes the academic foundations on which our call to arms is built. Part II contains most of the new ideas: it sets out the principles that inform what we call ‘elective modernism’ and explains their implications for the ways in which scientific advice should be sought and used in policy-making. We argue that science should be seen as a moral enterprise and that the values that inform scientific work should be celebrated; this, as far as we know, is a new idea, so it takes precedence over the utilitarian justification of science in the argument of the book, but it can also be used in addition to the utilitarian argument when that works. Crucially, however, the moral argument works for sciences that do not have any obvious utility and, in that sense, it is prior. We argue at the same time for the primacy of democratic institutions in technological decision-making and invent a new kind of institution – ‘The Owls’ – whose job is to represent faithfully the content and degree of certainty of any technical advice that might be thought to bear on these decisions. Part III shows that we do what we say should be done in Part II. There we suggest that one of the values that characterizes science is ‘continuity’, by which we mean that even the most revolutionary of scientific ideas will seek to incorporate and retain a good portion of what was previously accepted as true. In Part III, we show the ways in which our ideas, which we have come to realize in the light of reactions to them must include an unintended element of revolutionary thinking, relate to the huge existing literature that deals with science and democracy. In Part IV, we sum up our argument in a manifesto for the future of science that sets out the key choices facing you, the reader, in as straightforward and uncompromising a manner as possible. Given what has been said so far, it will be no surprise that this manifesto emphasizes the moral responsibility of scientists to act in ways that preserve science’s traditions and values. If scientists fail in this task and we fail to support them in it, then a crucial element of the culture that sustains democratic societies will be lost.
Though both authors take full responsibility for the whole of this book, Collins was the lead author of Part II while Evans took the lead on Part III. The authors have to thank many people. We thank Martin Weinel for his marvellous analysis of the Thabo Mbeki, anti-retroviral drugs affair and for his contributions to the more political parts of this book. Under slightly changed circumstances, he would have been a co-author. Above all, we thank the various audiences who have been willing to listen to talk of elective modernism. The term had been batted around a bit but the ideas were probably first presented by Collins on 8 October 2008 at the regular meeting of Cardiff’s Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise and Science, and since then they have been presented at many national and international meetings and mentioned, en passant, in a few pieces of published work. Intervening events have slowed their presentation in extended form much more than we anticipated.
Part IIntroduction
1Science as a Moral Choice
What kind of society do we want to live in? There is plenty wrong with Western societies: huge and growing inequalities; unstable and corrupt financial systems; political systems whose logic places national self-regard above the terrible suffering of distant nations; and politicians for purchase. Worse, in Western societies we are no longer confident about our basic values. The realization that a sense of moral superiority was often a thin disguise for the exploitation of colonized peoples, and now the fear that exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources is risking our collective future, are causing us to question what we have traditionally thought of as progress. Maybe the exploited peoples had it right and a calm life in tune with nature, however short, and however bereft of technological goods, is better than the endless quest for more, for further, for faster.
This book deals with questions one level down from these concerns, taking it that the difference in quality between our lives and those of our distant ancestors does represent progress. There has been material progress, such as freedom from high rates of maternal and infant mortality and relief from the struggle to eat and stay warm, and, to a less marked extent, there has been moral progress, with the weak no longer living in continual fear of the strong. The problem that we address here is the potential or actual erosion of our style of life which is coextensive with the erosion of certain once-cherished values. We address one part of this problem: the role of science in society.
In earlier works – discussed later under the heading ‘Three Waves of Science Studies’ – we argued that, in spite of the huge enrichment of our critical understanding of the nature of science that has taken place since the 1970s, it is still important and intellectually possible to value expertise. Big arguments can be based on shallow foundations and we base our ideas about expertise on the commonsense view that it is better to give more weight to the opinions of those who, literally, know what they are talking about. But there are all kinds of experts who know what they are talking about: astrologers and astronomers; chemists and alchemists; tealeaf readers and econometricians. In our earlier arguments, there is only a brief justification of scientific expertise as opposed to other kinds of expertise. Here we complete another step in the Third Wave project by justifying scientific expertise in particular while making it as hard for ourselves as possible by accepting pretty well everything from the social constructionist critique of science that has emerged since the 1960s – The Second Wave. These days, academic discussions of science and technology grow ever more polarized, but the view here fits neither pole; it endorses the enriched understanding and critique of old models of science that came with the cognitive revolution of the 1970s but it also aims to preserve a special place for science in society.
The moral case for scientific values
We are interested in problems that can be understood in terms of the shared values and practices of social groups. As particular practices are repeated over time and become more widely shared, the values that they embody are reinforced and reproduced and we speak of them as becoming ‘institutionalized’. In some cases, this institutionalization has a formal face to it, with rules and protocols written down, and specialized roles created to ensure that procedures are followed correctly. The main institutions of state – parliament, courts, police and so on – along with certain of the professions, exhibit this formal character. Other social institutions, perhaps the majority, are not like this; science is an example. Although scientists are trained in the substantive content of their discipline, they are not formally instructed in ‘how to be a good scientist’. Instead, much like the young child learning how to play ‘nicely’, the apprentice scientist gains his or her understanding of the moral values inherent in the role by absorption from their colleagues – socialization.1 We think that these values, along with the values that inform many of the professions, are under threat, just as the value of the professions themselves is under threat.
The attacks on science come from many sources. From the outside, science is beset by post-modernist analysis that sees no truth, only ‘accounts’; it is beset by environmentalist critiques that see science as an instrument of ecological disaster; and it is beset by political regimes that see value only in economic terms, or, in America, can make political capital by contrasting science unfavourably with religion. Even in our own subject – the social studies of science – one never hears an argument or a position defended on the grounds that it is ‘scientific’; the very idea would be dismissed as naïve since it is now believed there no longer is such a thing as science distinct from society. Science is also under attack from the inside. Scientists, thinking to defend their culture from politicians wishing to reduce taxes, rush to embrace the idea that they can deliver material and cultural goods to society – science is in there with capitalism forging new start-up companies, providing impactful outputs that increase productivity and efficiency, and entertaining the masses with astonishing revelations about the nature of the heavens. But you need a long spoon to sup with the devil. The danger is that soon science will be valued only for its material and entertainment value. The intention may be good but too many scientists are selling their profession in the wrong marketplace.
Professions, professionalism and moral leadership
A society is made up of institutions: transport systems, educational systems, healthcare services, providers of housing, food producers, police, lawyers, the military, sportspersons, entertainers, churches, political institutions, businesses and banks. The moral life of a society is, in part, an aggregate of the moral substance of these institutions. In institutions like religion, the moral role is explicit. But religion is also the most obvious example of how the moral leadership role of an institution can decline. In the UK, the established church – the Church of England – is still saying all the right things, but hardly anyone is listening. In the US the situation is different, with religious institutions still strong, but there are many competing ideas, very few of which are ready to confront the dominance of free-market capitalism. And it is probably free-market capitalism that has had the most corrosive influence on democratic life in the second half of the twentieth century, not least because it has subverted and undermined the notion of professionalism.
In some of the earliest work on the nature of professions (e.g., by Durkheim and later Parsons2), professions such as law and medicine are explicitly linked with the moral qualities expected of their practitioners and the stabilizing effect this had on society as a whole. In contrast, the contemporary idea of professionalism has a more managerial and ideological meaning in which ideas of autonomy and personal responsibility are used to retain some degree of market power but also, within organizations, to discipline workers by creating normative expectations of duty, responsibility and care. This marketization of the professions, in which professionalism ‘becomes more commercially aware, budget focused, managerial, entrepreneurial and so forth’ undermines the idea of professions as repositories of moral standards.3
In many spheres of work, these changes in work practices are clearly visible. Professionalism is widely trumpeted as a value for workers of all sorts, and new professional bodies spring up all the time to protect this new jurisdiction. Whilst, for many, the contemporary demands of professionalism are experienced as attempts by those in more senior positions to devolve responsibility to those lower down the organizational hierarchy, for those with genuine autonomy there is evidence that the old moral codes no longer apply. When one of the authors of this book was young, the banks could be held up as an object lesson in integrity. The success of ‘The City’ – London’s ‘square mile’ – was said to be based on the fact that everyone knew that a handshake could seal a deal that would never be broken. Collins’s mother told him about her friend, who worked in a bank, once spending the entire night searching for the mistake that had caused a discrepancy in the accounts amounting to a halfpenny. But Thatcher’s doctrines – ‘greed is good’, and ‘there is no such thing as society’ – backed up by Reagan’s free-market religion, led to Enron, to crash after crash, and a succession of corruption scandals such that, nowadays, in so far as the banks offer leadership, it is in unbridled self-interest.
In the UK it sometimes feels as if there are now hardly any institutions that the citizen can trust: politicians fiddle their expenses, celebrities turn out to be sex offenders, newspapers hack into the voicemails of private citizens to source stories, energy companies have tariff structures so complicated it is impossible for consumers to make good choices, sports administration is corrupt and performances aided by organized regimes of doping, food labelling is no longer accurate and so on, with a new revelation every week or so. Ironically, the time now required to check and re-check is, in economic terms, colossally inefficient, just as living in some regions of the developing world can be colossally inefficient because of the day-to-day corruption against which market theorists rail. The value of self-interest that the religion of the market promotes is nowadays driving our societies backwards just as once it drove them forward.
Notice, then, that the concern of this book is out of kilter with much contemporary social science: we are not attempting to solve problems of inequality or inter-generational justice. We agree these problems are serious but so much effort is already directed at them that we risk producing a sociological monoculture. In contrast, we are concerned with preserving the fragile tissue of democratic norms and values that is being eroded by the day-to-day violence, corruption and crude exercise of government-sponsored force in many nations around the world and by the growing corrosion of our own ‘Western’ societies, driven by an unconstrained free-market ideology. In contemporary science and technology studies, the predominant motif is to eliminate the division of powers between science and politics in order that science and technology can become socially responsible. In contrast, our motif is to safeguard the division of powers so that science and technology can act independently of society! Most social analysts think that democracy needs protecting against scientific and technological experts; we argue that scientific and technical experts have the potential to protect democracy!
The difference arises out of what you think about society: if you think our existing societies are benign, then it may be wise to make science and technology answer to them, but if you think our societies are becoming more corrupt and less benign, then you might want science and technology to retain their independence. The principle will be familiar to the academic readers of this book who insist that their own independence of thought be protected by university tenure or its equivalent. Indeed, it is quite striking that university academics are so strident in their justifications of tenure, while at the same time many demand that science answers to the demands of society. We base our argument around the norms of science and it is not surprising that the best-known previous discussion of these norms was associated with the rise of fascism – with the sudden realization that societies were not going to be benign for much longer, so independence for scientists and academics in general became what we desperately wanted. That is why we are looking to science as an institution that can give moral leadership, rather than as something from which society needs protecting.
Science is not the only institution that has the ability to hold the moral line. In the UK, the National Health Service is another – at least, bits of the National Health Service (NHS). Both authors can attest that when you make it to the head of a waiting list, or if you are unlucky enough to need emergency treatment, the NHS is brilliant at every level, from the consultants to those who empty the bed pans. Consultants, of course, are well paid, but the middle ranks of nurses and auxiliaries are not, yet, in our experience, they provide a level of care, both emotional and practical, that leaves one knowing there still is such a thing as society and that contact with lives lived with integrity is rewarding beyond riches. The trouble is, of course, that mostly the NHS is celebrated for long waiting lists and newsworthy scandals; the NHS is not in a position to give moral leadership to anyone but the seriously ill and they are not a particularly vocal minority – especially as the rich and powerful are more and more sucked out of its domain and into private care.
Are there other flourishing institutions providing moral leadership for Western societies? It is hard to think of any obvious cases. What is sure is that we need such institutions desperately. What we argue in this book is that science could be one of these institutions – an institution that can provide moral leadership. This is because good actions are intrinsic to science’s raison d’être. It has become the fashion to attack science and, of course, we have seen the corrosive effect of marketization on science, not only in the way honest scientists are persuaded to sell their profession but also with increasing fraud and the willingness of some ‘scientists’ to adjust the content of their findings according to the price on offer. Nevertheless, parts of science are still intact. We need to make science’s special nature clear, and show society what it stands for, before it is overwhelmed by the free-market tsunami like so much else.4 This is not a worldly-wise book, it is not smartly sophisticated; it is desperately grasping for the last vestiges of naïveté.
Three Waves of science studies
The academic foundations of this book are the social studies of science, but it takes a stance that is at variance with its mainstream. It is useful to divide the social studies of science into three waves. As with all heuristics, the categorization is not perfect and, as we demonstrate, there is some continuity and overlap between the waves. Despite this the idea of three waves provides a quick and easy way of setting out the key issues and why they matter.
To start at the beginning, Wave One was the period in which it was believed that science was unquestionably the pre-eminent form of knowledge-making and that its knowledge was absolute and universalistic. Wave One runs from at least the early twentieth Century, if not earlier, and was at its most influential in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, predicted a future in which ‘our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter’.5 Within the social sciences, this was the period in which Robert Merton was writing about the importance of democratic societies fostering scientific norms (see chapter 2), and in which the social analysis of science focused on explaining scientific error not scientific truth. Under Wave One, the correctness of scientific research needed no social explanation – it was true, so no further explanation was required – but what did need to be explained, typically by social mechanisms such as prejudice, bias, special interests and so on, was how false beliefs were mistakenly taken to be correct. Although this view is no longer supported by many in the social sciences, it remains the commonsense view of practising scientists. It also informs many popular representations of science including, for example, the forensic science genre of police procedurals in which technical analysis inexorably reveals the facts of the matter.
Wave Two is more recent, with what are now seen as its foundational works – in particular, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – emerging in the 1960s. It would be wrong to say that all these early authors were engaged in, or even supported, the social constructionist analysis of scientific knowledge in which both ‘true’ and ‘false’ beliefs were explained in the same way. Instead, this period saw the publication of several major works, of which Kuhn’s is the exemplar, that were taken up by others and used as the basis of analyses that showed that scientific truth is best seen as an outcome of negotiation and agreement located within social groups.6 Over the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Wave Two social scientists produced a wide range of case studies that demonstrated that the scientific method could not work as previously advertised and that scientific findings were much more affected by their social context than had previously been believed. This, in turn, had important implications for the role of science in society and, in particular, the use of scientific advice in policy-making. In brief, Wave Two provided a powerful argument against technocracy by showing how expert advice rested on a sea of social assumptions. This, in turn, led to arguments in favour of the democratization of science, and of expertise more generally, in order that the interests and priorities that inevitably coloured expert advice would better reflect the concerns of the wider society. Collins is a founding contributor of Wave Two and continues to work in this vein to this day (e.g., in his studies of gravitational wave physics).7
Wave Three, of which this book is a part, accepts everything that Wave Two has said about the nature of scientific work but disagrees with its conclusions. Where Wave Three differs from Wave Two is in its normative position. Wave Two has a ‘default setting’ in favour of more democratization, but Wave Three wants to replace this with a dial that can be turned to different places according to the nature and integrity of the science. The aim of Wave Three of science studies is to preserve the idea of expertise as specialist knowledge and to find a better way of analysing and managing the trade-offs between expert authority and democratic accountability. In what follows, we briefly outline the contrasts between the Wave Two and Wave Three approaches. We then outline the concepts and ideas that have emerged from this work and explain how they inform this book.
Elements of the Third Wave
Wave Three begins with a paper that we published in the leading science studies journal Social Studies of Science (Collins and Evans, 2002). That paper contained both a technical element, expressed as a nascent classification of expertise, and a political element, expressed as a call for scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) to use their expertise about expertise to intervene in public debates. In particular, we argued that STS should use its unrivalled understanding of knowledge-making practices to help inform decisions about whether or not particular groups or individuals have a legitimate claim to expertise.
The paper has now been cited many times (1,700+ by June 2016) and, in the months following its publication, it received four published replies – one positive but three negative – to which we were allowed to publish a formal response.8 Although the critical replies made their arguments in different ways, they shared a general sense that the political argument of the ‘Third Wave’ was a step backward rather than forward. It was suggested that it was incompatible with Wave Two rather than consistent with it, and that it presaged a return to technocracy by giving undue power to scientific experts. Despite our many carefully worked-out denials of this claim – for example, we state over and over again that democracy always has the last word and that the only thing we ask is that it not misrepresent the claims of experts – this misrepresentation of our position regarding the political implications of the Third Wave approach is ever present (see chapter 4). In contrast, the technical element did not receive anything like the same degree of criticism and has been much less controversial.9
Following the initial publication, much of our work concentrated on the technical part of the Third Wave programme, leading to a much richer classification of expertise than originally proposed, a lot of work on the idea of interactional expertise, and the development of the Imitation Game as a research method.10 As a result of this effort, the political side of the programme remained relatively neglected until the (as we saw it) inaccurate portrayal of the Third Wave by Frank Fischer in his book Democracy and Expertise (2009). This led to an exchange of papers in the journal Critical Policy Studies, of which ‘The Politics and Policy of the Third Wave’ represents our attempt to lay to rest some of the misunderstandings created by the initial responses to the Third Wave paper. Unfortunately, the replies to this paper suggest that we were not entirely successful. Our response to these replies was thus yet another attempt to set the record straight, with this volume providing, in addition to its main aim, the complete – and we hope compelling – statement of our position needed to reassure critics that our views do not lead in the dangerous directions they say.11
Problems of legitimacy and extension
One way of understanding the difference between Wave Two and Wave Three is to see them as attempts to solve different problems created by technological decision-making in the public domain. Wave Two, at least in its political guise, is an attempt to solve the ‘problem of legitimacy’ that arises when expert authority is allowed to ride roughshod over the concerns of others. Wave Two provides both a diagnosis and solution for this problem by demonstrating: (a) that the apparently neutral and objective advice provided by technical experts cannot have the unquestionable epistemological authority it claims; and (b) that a more robust solution could be reached by incorporating a wider range of perspectives and experiences into the decision-making process. A simple example, taken from Alan Irwin’s Citizen Science, makes the point: in the late 1970s and early 1980s, farmworkers in the UK were concerned about the safety of an organophosphate herbicide called 2,4,5,T. The farmworkers believed that it caused a number of health problems, including miscarriages and birth defects, whereas the government advisors, formally represented by the Advisory Committee on Pesticide (ACP), insisted that the chemical was safe as long as it was used correctly. In reaching their decision, the ACP made an epistemic judgement that the experiential evidence of individual farmworkers was worth less than epidemiological studies or laboratory research, and a social judgement that the facilities and training needed to use the chemical safely were routinely available to farmworkers. This last point is particularly important as one might reasonably expect that the farmworkers would be better informed about the circumstances in which 2,4,5,T was actually used than the scientists on the ACP. The implication of Irwin’s analysis – and it is surely correct – is that the ACP’s decision would have been more robust – and certainly more legitimate – if it had deferred to the farmworkers in those areas where they had the relevant experience and recognized that the normal conditions of use fell some way short of the recommended standards.12
In contrast, Wave Three is concerned with a different, albeit related, problem: the problem of extension.13 The problem of extension arises because the arguments put forward under Wave Two did not contain any explicit criteria for setting limits to participation: Wave Two opens the policy-making door to new kinds of expert but has no mechanism for determining who should be granted entry and who should remain outside. But consider cases such as 2,4,5,T, where the extra knowledge needed can be found only among certain specialists who happen not to be qualified scientists but who still have privileged access to a particular kind of experience-based expertise. Huge confusion was caused by advocates of more democratization referring to experts such as the farmworkers as ‘lay experts’, because it made it seem as though anyone could be an expert. The problem of extension is thus concerned with how to operationalize ‘more heterogeneous participation’ in such a way that the relevant expertises identified under Wave Two approaches are included, but irrelevant non-expert contributions are excluded from the expert forums that feed into democracy. If done correctly, the solution to the problem of legitimacy is also the solution to the problem of extension: all the ‘right’ people will have a say in the technical debate, and those who have no relevant specialist expertise will contribute as citizens participating in existing democratic institutions without pretending to be, or being described as, experts.14
A typology of expertise
In order to define what ‘relevant specialist expertise’ means, Wave Three begins by treating expertise as ‘real’ – that is, as something a person or group possesses – and then develops a theory of expertise that can be used to distinguish between different types, levels and kinds of expertise.15 This is the technical element of the programme. The classification of expertises is explained in most detail in Rethinking Expertise, from which table 1.1 is taken. It is based on the sociological axiom that expertise is the outcome of successful socialization into a social group. The various skills and expertises an individual possesses are then the accumulation of the social groups in which he or she is a successful participant, while the absence of socialization implies the absence of that expertise.16
The structure of the table is founded on the different ways in which it is possible to participate in a social group. Working from the top, the first two rows identify the society-wide ubiquitous expertises and dispositions (personal characteristics) that enable socialization to take place, and which lay the foundation for developing narrower specialist expertises and more generic meta-expertises. The different types of specialist expertise correspond to commonsense understandings. Thus, the first three categories denote the kinds of understanding that can be achieved solely by using resources such as magazines, books, academic journals, Google, YouTube videos and so on. As these do not permit any direct interaction with the community in question, none of the tacit knowledge that is unique to that expertise can be acquired by the learner; instead, the learner has only the ubiquitous tacit knowledge needed for everyday life, bolstered, perhaps, by specialist information. In contrast, the last two types of specialist expertise – interactional expertise and contributory expertise – do require immersion in the relevant community and so enable the learner to develop the specialist tacit knowledge used in that domain of practice. Thus, in the example given above, we might say that farmworkers had contributory expertise in the practical application of organophosphate herbicides in outdoor environments and, on that basis, had a legitimate contribution to make in discussions about the regulation and use of these chemicals.
Table 1.1 The Periodic Table of Expertises
(Source: Collins and Evans, 2007)
The meta-expertises row captures the opportunity cost of the extended socialization needed to become a contributory expert and identifies the ways in which people can make judgements about expert claims even though they are not experts themselves. Again, there are some methods – ubiquitous and local discrimination – that do not depend on any knowledge of the domain in question and which ‘transmute’ purely social judgements about who to trust into beliefs about the state or nature of the world. There are other abilities – technical connoisseurship, downward discrimination and referred expertise – that differ in that they require some familiarity with what is being judged.
Technical and political phases
The second element of the Third Wave paper was the more political one. Here we argued that STS could contribute to technological decision-making in the public domain and that doing this required distinguishing between two kinds of activity. These were labelled the ‘technical phase’ and the ‘political phase’. The intention was to draw attention to the ways in which technological decision-making combined two different institutional practices, and to argue that it was important to retain the distinction between them if science, already seen by some as ‘politics by other means’, was not to become indistinguishable from the networking, horsetrading and pork-barrelling that characterize the overtly political elements of the public domain. Much of the controversy about the Third Wave paper turns on this difference, with critics claiming that it is impossible to distinguish between the technical and political without reinventing the Wave One fact–value distinction that Wave Two had so comprehensively destroyed. As this entire book can be seen as a rejection and refutation of this claim, we do not dwell on it here and, instead, concentrate on summarizing the distinction as it was originally proposed and noting the relatively minor changes that have emerged since then.
