Expertise and the Citizen

Collins and Evans (2007) provide the basis for this next section. They clearly articulate our collective movement into “The Third Wave of Science Studies”. They say that a distinction is to be made between experiences that the public has a lot of, and therefore cannot be considered specialist knowledge, and specialist expertise, in that it is notable that someone has experience and skills in an area. They feel strongly that “experts should obviously have a relatively greater input where their results are more reliable” (p135), which is to say, areas of technical expertise and social sciences. They are not talking about areas such as culture and religion.

There has been an “epistemological leveling” over the last few decades as seen in Polanyi’s “Republic of Science” (Polanyi, 1962). Science has become

more approachable and knowable and “familiar,” “demystified,” and it is the right of everyone to be accepted into the role of scientist, assuming that norms are observed. But now is the time that we need to rebuild some of the vertical that has been leveled (Collins & Evans, 2007, 139).

The metaphor of the mountain (Collins & Pinch, 1993) is referred to di- rectly:

Nevertheless, to take it that the epistemological landscape is with- out a vertical dimension is to abandon responsibility for the world we live in. The new job of social scientists, having been so suc- cessful with the leveling, is to rebuild some structure – or, more properly, since it is obvious that there is lots of vertical structure – to understand what holds things up.

And given this mandate, the responsibility falls to the individuals of so- ciety. We need to decide who we confer power on and in what realms they should wield that power of authority. “In the absence of suitable specialist experience, the citizen can make technical judgments only through the trans- mutation of expertise that starts with the social expertise of ubiquitous and local discrimination – a matter of choosing who to believe rather that what to believe” (Collins & Evans, 2007, 139).

The citizen does not have to know everything or be able to prove anything on their own, they only have to have a system of credentials they can believe in and trust.

Transmuted knowledge does not make the citizen a scientific expert capable of contributing to the question of whether it is “p” or “not- p” that is true in any particular scientific debate, but it can help the citizen make a sensible decision about whether his or her political decision should be premised on p or not-p. (Collins & Evans, 2007,

139)

The scientists themselves have a greater burden as well, through trans- parency and methodology. If the discussions around what science has to give to society are driven by the experts, then the “social scientists, philosophers, and other experts on expertise must [be ready to do] more than [point] to the tension between the idea of expertise and the idea of democracy.” They need to guide the discussion and not just declare that a discussion needs to take place. Good policy is dependent on informed citizens and belief in a system of cognitive authority1 where cognitive authority is necessary (when decisions need to be made by those who are expert).

The struggle between democracy (an equal vote for all) and expertise (weighted votes for those who know) is a constant balance. Getting to the point where the population feels involved but guided by knowledge instead of ideology is hard. Getting there

means working out some way of deciding how to use expertise even when we know it is much less sure than once we thought it was, even when we know it is too early to know who the experts really are, and even when we know that it seems undemocratic to select a group of experts, however wide, to whom we grant more author- ity than we grant to the ordinary citizen. We must be ready to alleviate the tension between democracy and expertise by helping with the design of citizens’ juries and consensus conferences: help- ing not just by saying “let us bring in some citizens” but by stating what kinds of citizens with what backgrounds would be best and what kind of and what length of exposure to what sort of technical

1_{Patrick Wilson wrote about cognitive authority as distinct from administrative author-}

ity. Cognitive authority is that which is granted to you by others because of what they think you know about. Administrative authority is that which one has because of rank or position (Wilson, 1983).

material might turn them into better representatives of the rest. (Collins & Evans, 2007)

There will always be a mathematical distribution of expertise and knowl- edge within a population. There will be members with low knowledge and members with high knowledge. There will be members with amounts in- between. And there is never an ideal amount of consensus when it is time to make a decision. The role of expertise here is to serve as shortcut for those who do not know enough to make a decision based only on the merits and details of the case at hand. These members want to and must rely on the part of the population thatcan understand the merits and details. These low knowledge members must have a mechanism by which to choose which ex- perts to trust. It is the responsibility of the group as a whole to provide that mechanism.