The article presents specific recommendations for the examination of AI systems in medicine developed by the authors. The recommendations based on the problems, risks and limitations of the use of AI identified in scientific and philosophical publications of 2019-2022. It is proposed to carry out ethical expertise of projects of medical AI, by analogy with the review of projects of experimental activities in biomedicine; to conduct an ethical review of AI systems at the stage of preparation for their development (...) followed by monitoring the testing of the created system; to focus on bioethical principles during the examination of AI systems for medical purposes. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates (...) in the respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

En répondant à des demandes émanant des institutions impliquées dans le domaine de la santé, l’Inserm prolonge sa mission de recherche par une activité de diffusion et de partage des connaissances et participe à la réflexion sur les implications collectives de cette recherche. Aujourd’hui intégrée à l’Institut de santé publique dans le cadre de l’Alliance nationale pour les sciences de la vie et de la santé , l’activité d’expertise collective participe au plan stratégique 2010-2015 de l’Inserm : « l’expérience (...) acquise en matière d’expertise collective sera renforcée au service d’une politique active de mise à disposition des connaissances disponibles pour l’aide à la décision des acteurs du système de santé et l’information des citoyens ».In response to demand from the institutions involved in public health, Inserm has taken its research mission further by becoming involved in knowledge sharing and dissemination and in discussions on the implications of its research for society. Now working as a member of the Public Health Institute through the National Alliance for Life and Health Sciences , INSERM’s collective expert studies are contributing to its strategic plan for 2010-2015: “the experience gained in collectively developed expert studies will be strengthened to serve an active policy for delivering available knowledge to support decision-making in the public health system and citizens’ information”. (shrink)

Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the (...) bodies of its members but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word. (shrink)

Christian Quast has presented what he describes as a ‘role-functional’ account of expertise as a form of knowledge that purports to take into account prior discussions within recent analytic social epistemology and allied fields. I argue that his scrupulousness results in a confused version of the role-functional account, which I try to remedy by presenting a ‘clean’ account that clearly distinguishes such an account from what Quast calls a ‘competence-driven’ one. The key point of my account is that (...) ‘competence’ pertains to knowledge in closed systems and ‘expertise’ in open systems. I observe that the invocation of ‘reliability’ as an epistemic standard simply serves to confuse the difference between the competence-driven and role-functional accounts. (shrink)

A health justice approach requires a progressive critique of expertise. This article considers two recent high-profile cases – the mask mandate and medication abortion -- to understand how we should think the mobilization of expertise in the context of public health law. Following from this, the article offers news ways to better understand how to think of the relationship between health law, expertise, and politics.

The article asks how contemporary expert arrangements should be (re-)designed in the face of calls for their democratization. To address this question, four philosophically grounded, ideal-type institutional proposals regarding the democracy–expertise relationship are introduced, compared, and assessed. The proposals are science in democracy – an approach primarily concerned with safeguarding independent scientific institutions positioned within a larger democratic system; direct democratization – an approach that focuses on expert arrangements more broadly and the need for direct measures of democratization; partisan (...) expertise – an approach which questions the possibility of independent, politically neutral expertise; and citizens as knowers – an approach which questions the need for expert institutions in the first place. In the way they are outlined, all proposals come with significant insights and make some valuable suggestions, and to a certain extent, they are complementary. However, they come with limitations too, and a preferable fifth proposal is sketched – epistemically justified expertise – an approach focused on facilitating democratization measures that can be defended on epistemic grounds. Overall, the article intervenes on a general level to address a set of crucial institutional and philosophical questions regarding democratization of expertise, and across the scholarly divides between epistemology, philosophy of science and political philosophy. (shrink)

La question des relations entre expertise scientifique, société et politique est fondamentalement communicationnelle. Souvent présenté comme univoque et incontestable, l’avis des experts ne fait pas taire les controverses. Il est élaboré dans le cadre de relations toujours incertaines, mobilisant les multiples parties prenantes de l’objet de l’expertise dans une situation sociale. Les connaissances qui en résultent constituent, quelque part, des récits qui relèvent de multiples interprétations et recadrages traduisant des logiques d’action hétérogènes, des intérêts économiques et politiques contradictoires, (...) des tensions et des conflits. Ce mouvement s’opère en lien étroit avec les médias et réseaux, au travers desquels les résultats de l’expertise sont diffusés, et de plus en plus souvent discutés.The question of relationships between scientific expertise, society and politics fundamentally revolves around communication. Though often presented as unequivocal and indisputable, expert scientific opinions do not put an end to controversy. They are developed in the context of relationships that are always uncertain, involve many different stakeholders with an interest in the object of the controversy and exist in a social situation. The resulting knowledge shapes narratives that can be interpreted and framed in many different ways, each reflecting different reasons for action, conflicting economic and political interests, tensions or disputes. This process takes place in close conjunction with the activities of the media and networks, through which expert conclusions are broadcast and increasingly debated. (shrink)

Rather than ask if expertise is under threat, this paper uses case studies to show how expertise is enabled. Its appearance can be traced to how the already known evokes sensibility, judging, thinking and languaging. As defined below, it draws on epistemic cycles. Using Secchi and Cowley’s (2021) 3M model, this posits a second cut between the micro and the macro. In the mesosphere, people create temporary domains or what William James (1991) calls ‘little worlds’. Within these corpora (...) popularia, the new is made possible – expertise sets off unimagined outcomes. Thus, many concerns cannot be solved by scientific correlates of a natural ontological attitude: indeed, the truism clarifies many social challenges. We lack social institutions that dedicate expertise to goals like ecosocial justice and life-sustaining relations. Once the necessary expertise is traced to epistemic cycles, we can demand of institutions that they create bodies that seek to bring a rich future to evolution. (shrink)

Key to concerns about public involvement in technology governance is the concept of lay expertise, the idea that lay people possess some kind of special knowledge that neither trained experts in technology, ethics and social sciences nor professional politicians possess. There are at least four different meanings of "lay expert": (1) Lay people who are educated into quasi-experts on a particular issue or technology; (2) Lay people who turn themselves into experts in order to challenge scientific experts; (3) (...) Lay people with particular knowledge based on tradition and experience; (4) Lay people who represent an alternative perspective to expert views because they are non-experts. The challenge is that lay people are often ignorant in the relevant matters and wish to leave governance to experts. Still, there are normative reasons for lay engagement, either as stakeholders or as citizens in a deliberative democracy. According to the second approach, political decisions should be based on an inclusive open debate aimed at the better argument, providing lay people a crucial role in governance. In order to include lay people without making them hostage to experts, politicians or interest groups, we can engage them in focus group interviews which are analysed by social scientists and included in the interdisciplinary debate in journals and political forums. (shrink)

Practical knowledge is discussed in close relation to practical expertise. For both anti-intellectualists and intellectualists, the knowledge of how to φ is widely assumed to entail the practical expertise in φ-ing. This paper refutes this assumption. I argue that non-experts can know how to φ via other experts’ knowledge of φ-ing. Know-how can be ‘outsourced’. I defend the outsourceability of know-how, and I refute the objections that reduce outsourced know-how to the knowledge of how to ask for help, (...) of how to get things done, or of external contents. Interestingly, outsourcing differs from social cooperation, collective agency, testimonial transmission, and many other notions in social-epistemological debates. Thus, outsourcing provides not only a hitherto unconsidered form of know-how but also a novel way for knowledge to be social. Furthermore, outsourcing plausibly involves a ‘social’ cognitive extension that does not rest on EMT or HEC. Given the outsourceability of know-how, we must reconsider the nature of know-how and expertise, as well as the relation between non-experts and experts. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social (...) interaction, and which, according to interactionists, present an alternative to mindreading as a source of social understanding. We agree that it is important to take embodied interaction seriously, but do not agree that this presents a fundamental challenge to mainstream mindreading approaches. Drawing upon an analogy between embodied interaction and the exercise of expert skills, we advocate a hierarchical view which claims that embodied social responses generally operate in close conjunction with higher-level cognitive processes that play a coordinative role, and which are often sensitive to mental states. Thus, investigation of embodied responses should inform rather than conflict with research on mindreading. (shrink)

Modern dialogue of society and science proceeds in the conditions of social media distribution and the convergence of scientific knowledge. This processes change system of mass information and communication channels between scientific actors, leaders of public opinion and organizers of public initiatives. The conflict between an elite normativity of a scientific discourse and an egalitarian normativity of a public discourse takes the new forms. Authors show how in large quantities extending practice of civil expertise, based on civil journalism (...) (a blogosphere and social networks), interrupt into procedures of scientific examination. Active inclusion of civil experts became an attribute of transdisciplinary science. The main feature of this type of science is operational decision making in the conditions of uncertainty. However transition of transdisciplinary science to a phase of the technoscience defines convergence borders of the formal and informal knowledge. Technoscience takes root into the vital world as a magic “black box” for the inhabitant. Authors believe that the transdialogue formed by transdisciplinary scientific experts and deprofessionalized leaders of civil journalism is complicated by deficiency of epistemological competence of civil experts. One of the problem is inclusion the electronic media practices in production and the social circulation of scientific knowledge. Using rather known, but not yet entered in the field of philosophical scientific research examples of direct influence of civil experts on processes which in a former communication order were intra scientific, authors realised a research of the new aspects of modern science expanding a traditional subject of philosophy of science and technology. (shrink)

It is argued that future research capacity building for the social sciences needs to incorporate methods to accelerate the acquisition by researchers of holistic expertise relevant to their roles as researchers and as developers of others. An agenda is presented, based on a model of learning that highlights missing elements of current provision, and two approaches currently under development are described.

Can we legitimately speak of ethicsexperts? Recent literature in philosophy and medical ethics addresses this important question but does not offer a satisfactory answer. Part of the problem is the absence of an examination of what it means to be an expert in general. I therefore begin by reviewing my analysis of expertise which appeared earlier in this journal. We speak of two kinds of experts: persons whose expertise is in virtue of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or (...) what theydo (performative expertise). Applying this analysis to the domain of ethics, I argue that we may speak of ethical expertise in three epistemic senses: a) expertise indescriptive ethics, b) expertise inmetaethics, c) expertise innormative ethics, and in a performative sense: d) expertise inliving a good life. I conclude with a brief description of some social roles of ethics experts. (shrink)

The article attempts to develop the methodological foundations of innovation as a new field of scientific research that studies innovation in science, culture and society. On the basis of the philosophical and methodological approach, the term “innovation” is conceptualized. The definition of the concept of innovation proposed in the article is based on the “procedural approach” in the interpretation of innovation activity and at the same time emphasizes the significance of the final result in the form of a new product (...) that has commercial (social) value. In the context of modern trends in technogenic civilization, the essential features of innovative activity are revealed, its high degree of uncertainty and sensitivity to random changes and the influence of the external environment is revealed, it is shown that, along with organization, self-organization processes play an important role in it, manifested in complex, spontaneous changes accompanying the emergence of innovations. It is concluded that these features are evidence of the synergistic nature of innovation. The “rehabilitation” of synergetics is being carried out, which is considered as an ontological basis for building an innovative methodology. The article also formulates the basic principles of innovation methodology: openness of innovation, unity of linearity and non-linearity, probabilistic nature, the principle of systemic communication and organization, interdisciplinarity, the principle of relying on feedback. The possibility of creating an innovative method is being assessed. On this basis, the modern status of innovation is determined as an independent field of knowledge that has its own object, subject, functions, subjects, methodology, social mechanisms and the sphere of innovative consciousness, as well as other distinctive features of any particular science. A new approach to understanding the social and humanitarian expertise of high-risk innovative projects is proposed. (shrink)

I analyse the case of three Japanese-Portuguese interpreters who have given support to technology transfer from a steel company in Japan to one in Brazil for more than thirty years. Their job requires them to be ‘interactional experts’ in steel-making. The Japanese–Portuguese interpreters are immersed in more than the language of steel-making as their job involves a great deal of ‘physical contiguity’ with steel-making practice. Physical contiguity undoubtedly makes the acquisition of interactional expertise easier. This draws attention to the (...) lack of empirical work on the exact way that the physical and the linguistic interact in the acquisition of interactional expertise, or any other kind of expertise.Keywords: Interactional expertise; Technology transfer; Interpreting; Physical contiguity; Linguistic socialization. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary debate about the nature of expertise often conflates having expertise with either the individual possession of competences or a certain role ascription. In contrast to this, the paper attempts to demonstrate how different dimensions of expertise ascription are inextricably interwoven. As a result, a balanced account of expertise will be proposed that more accurately determines the closer relationship between the expert’s dispositions, their manifestations and the expert’s function. This finally results in an advanced understanding (...) of expertise that views someone as an expert only if she is undefeatedly disposed to fulfill a contextually salient service function adequately at the moment of assessment. (shrink)

This paper will consider the extent to which patients' dependence on clinical expertise when making medical decisions threatens patient autonomy. I start by discussing whether or not dependence on experts isprima facietroubling for autonomy and suggest that it is not. I then go on to consider doctors' and other healthcare professionals' status as ‘medical experts’ of the relevant sort and highlight a number of ways in which their expertise is likely to be deficient. I then consider how this (...) revised picture of medical expertise should lead us to view the potential threat to patient autonomy that results from depending on such ‘experts’. I argue that, whether or not patients are aware of the limitations of medical expertise, in practice it is difficult to do other than defer to medical advice, and this presents a threat to patient autonomy that should be addressed. I conclude by suggesting some ways in which this threat to autonomy might be mitigated. (shrink)

Most professions rest on the expertise of their members. Professionals are professionals primarily because they know more than most of us about something of importance to our society or to many members of it. Professionals are given power, respect, prestige, and above average incomes. If professionals are worthy of this status, it is largely because of their special knowledge and the way they use it. And if professionals have special rights and responsibilities, it is also primarily because of the (...) social positions they occupy due to their presumed expertise. (shrink)

‘Interactional expertise’ is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well socialized in the (...) language of a specialist group is indistinguishable from those with full blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like.Keywords: Expertise; Interactional expertise; Imitation game; Turing test; Colour blindness; Interpretative methods. (shrink)

The Gifting Logos: Expertise in the Digital Commons provides an extensive analysis of knowledge and creativity in twenty-first century networked culture. Analyzing massive projects like the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, and the Creative Commons Licenses, The Gifting Logos responds to a fundamental question, What does it mean to know something and to make something? With the idea of a gifting logos, Hartelius integrates three habits of a rhetorical epistemology: the invention of cultural materials such as text, images, and (...) software; the imbuing or encoding of the materials with the creator's experience; and the constitution and dissemination of the materials as gifts. (shrink)

In National Socialist Germany Jewish academicians and professional staff were initially deprived of their rights and marginalised, later they were chased down and murdered. With regard to those, who were able to escape the National Socialist realm of power, one can speak of a forced migration of academicians that reached a dimension which until now was unknown. A greater number of different academic as well as non-academic occupational groups have been examined in the past few years in connection with their (...) influence on scientific as well as social developments within the context of immigration. In this context Palestine, later Israel, occupies a special position. There exists a deficiency in research for the occupational group of physicians with regard to overindividual studies, which will be the focus of this analysis. There is no question about their part not only in the establishment of medical care structures in Palestine as well as the design and diversification of the Israeli health care system, but also in the international significance of Israeli developments in medicine and life sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. This study will examine members of a Zionist grouping that had exhibited Zionist engagement already before their flight from Europe. The objective of this examination is to determine the substantial contribution of Zionist physicians in designing the medical structures in the country. (shrink)

This article rejects the claim made by other scholars that Plato in the Statesman, by employing the so-called ‘architect’ (ὁ ἀρχιτέκτων) in one of the early divisions leading to the definition of political expertise, prefigured and anticipated the architectonic conception of political expertise advanced by Aristotle. It argues for an alternative reading in which Plato in the Statesman, and in the only other of his works (Gorgias) in which the word appears, closely tracks the existing social role (...) of the architektōn, who was designated as such only in virtue of appointment by a city to a role that was crucially defined as epitactic, involving overseeing the workers on site engaged in constructing some civic building works. It is this epitactic dimension of the role on which Plato relies in the Statesman, as opposed to the kind of claim to overarching integrative expertise that Aristotle would use the figure of architectonic political knowledge to make. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates (...) in the respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers tend to treat expertise as a property of special individuals. These are individuals who have devoted much more time than the general population to the acquisition of their specific expertises. They are often said to pass through stages as they move toward becoming experts, for example, passing from an early stage, in which they follow self-conscious rules, to an expert stage in which skills are executed unconsciously. This approach is ‘one-dimensional’. Here, two extra dimensions are added. (...) They are drawn from the programme known as Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE) and its ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’. SEE, which is sociological, and/or Wittgensteinian, in inspiration, takes expertise to be the property of groups; there are ‘domains’ of expertise. Under SEE, level of expertise grows with embedding in the society of domain experts; the key is the transmission of domain-specific tacit knowledge. Thus, one extra dimension is degree of exposure to tacit knowledge. Under SEE, domains can be big or small so there can be ‘ubiquitous tacit knowledge’, such as natural-language-speaking or other elements of general social behaviour, which belong to every member of a society. The second extra dimension is, therefore, ‘esotericity’. The resulting three-dimensional ‘expertise-space’ can be explored in a number of ways which reveal the narrowness of the analysis and the mistakes that have been made under the one-dimensional model. (shrink)

This article draws on ethnographic data from a field leading university licensing office to document and explain a key step in the process of institutionalization, the abstraction of standardized rules and procedures from idiosyncratic efforts to collectively resolve pressing problems. I present and analyze cases where solutions to complicated quandaries become abstract bits of professional knowledge and demonstrate that in some circumstances institutionalized practices can contribute to the flexibility of expert reasoning and decision-making. In this setting, expertise is rationalized (...) in response to institutional tensions between academic and business approaches to deal making and professional tensions between relational and legal approaches to negotiation. Abstraction and formalization contribute both to the convergence and stability of routines and to their improvisational use in professional work. Close attention to these processes in a strategic research setting sheds new light on an interesting tension in sociological theories of the professions while contributing to the development of a micro-level, social constructivist institutional theory. (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)

Many scholars characterize um as an involuntary emission that is devoid of meaning. Other scholars classify um as a non-linguistic signal that conveys certain messages or resolves a conversational problem, such as determining next speaker. Um is often assumed to signal `powerless language' because it displays speaker uncertainty. Yet an examination of real-time, written conversation in two online communities shows that participants sometimes use an um to mark an obvious flaw in prior talk. In the examples below, um may be (...) used to mark talk as flawed on the basis of information that is available to both parties. When um becomes associated with marking obvious flaws in prior talk, interlocutors may trade on this meaning and deploy an um to display for themselves a higher position of relative expertise, vis-à-vis their interlocutors, within local micro-social hierarchies of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTExpertise has come under attack not least since the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. In this contribution, I will provide some conceptual clarification and suggest a new topology of expertise. I will also examine the historical roots of this challenge to expertise and its social context using a comparative lens. I will ask what it could mean to speak of the rightful place of expertise. I will (...) try to provide an answer by looking more closely at different types of expertise. Expertise, it seems, has been used as an umbrella term for a variety of different knowledge-related activities. I will show that the role of the expert has to be differentiated from the role of the scientist, but also from the role of the specialist. Specialists have different tasks in comparison to experts which need to be emphasized. My argument will draw on the social and historical context of the critique of expertise, and discuss the challenge to the social sciences, espec... (shrink)

Disciplinary boundaries become increasingly unclear when grappling with “wicked problems,” which present a complex set of policy, cultural, technological, and scientific dimensions. “T-shaped” professionals, i.e. individuals with a depth and breadth of expertise, are being called upon to play a critical role in complex problem-solving. This paper unpacks the notion of the “T-shaped expert” and seeks to situate it within the broader academic literature on expertise, integration, and developmental learning. A component of this project includes an exploratory study, (...) which is aimed at evaluating the emergent attributes of T-shaped expertise in two different educational programs completed between January and May in 2015. The two programs build disciplinary knowledge in science, technology engineering, and mathematics fields at the core, while expanding the students’ awareness and comprehension of other expertise. The courses introduced science and engineering students to case study topics focusing around complex human-technological-ecological systems in a nanotechnology and society course; and the governance of genetically modified organisms in a science, technology, and society course. We analyze pre- and post-test data from this pilot project before presenting findings that pertain to student learning, as well as variants in the methodology and reflect on the utility of the selected methodology for evaluating expertise as it evolves over time. The paper closes with a discussion of a theory of acquisition with implications for delineating early attributes and characteristics of T-shaped expertise. (shrink)

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)

In this paper I offer a normative account of development expertise. Although extending expertise beyond the traditional development experts to include local stakeholders, this normative account aims to delimit legitimate forms of expertise. I label this normative view third wave development expertise. Third wave expertise is distinguished from both the technocratic and the social constructivist views of development expertise. In particular, I discuss the notions of contributory and interactional expertise. Contributory expertise (...) denotes the extent to which a group of agents possesses knowledge which can make a significant contribution to development decision-making, while interactional expertise denotes the extent to which they are able to communicate this knowledge meaningfully. While local stakeholders may possess contributory expertise in matters of their own development, they may lack interactional expertise to communicate this knowledge. Resolving this issue, I argue, requires a mediator who can interact with and between external experts and local stakeholders. (shrink)

‘Scientific advice to politics’, the ‘nature of expertise’, and the ‘relation between experts, policy makers, and the public’ are variations of a topic that currently attracts the attention of social scientists, philosophers of science as well as practitioners in the public sphere and the media. This renewed interest in a persistent theme is initiated by the call for a democratization of expertise that has become the order of the day in the legitimation of research funding. The new (...) significance of ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’ has motivated scholars to take a new look at the science – politics interface and to probe questions such as "What is new in the arrangement of scientific expertise and political decision-making?", "How can reliable knowledge be made useful for politics and society at large, and how can epistemically and ethically sound decisions be achieved without losing democratic legitimacy?", "How can the objective of democratization of expertise be achieved without compromising the quality and reliability of knowledge?" Scientific knowledge and the ‘experts’ that represent it no longer command the unquestioned authority and public trust that was once bestowed upon them, and yet, policy makers are more dependent on them than ever before. This collection of essays explores the relations between science and politics with the instruments of the social studies of science, thereby providing new insights into their re-alignment under a new régime of governance. (shrink)

We are facing a crisis of trust in expertise today. Fewer and fewer people trust experts, and more and more politicians openly ignore expert consensus. 'Democracy in the Post-Truth Era' asks what might happen to democracy if we reject the fundamental liberal assumption that people are capable of making informed choices. The book explores the potential impact on society if people, including politicians, never appreciate the relevance of expert opinions. What if people cannot choose between supporters and opponents of (...) key issues such as the causes of climate change, effectiveness of vaccines and ways of combating economic and social crises? Applying social epistemology to these questions, the book considers whether democracy can be defended in the post-truth era. (shrink)

Dreyfus's model of expert skill acquisition is philosophically important because it shifts the focus on expertise away from its social and technical externalization in STS, and its relegation to the historical and psychological context of discovery in the classical philosophy of science, to universal structures of embodied cognition and affect. In doing so he explains why experts are not best described as ideologues and why their authority is not exclusively based on social networking. Moreover, by phenomenologically analyzing (...) expertise from a first person perspective, he reveals the limitations of, and sometimes superficial treatment that comes from, investigating expertise from a third person perspective. Thus, he shows that expertise is a prime example of a subject that is essential to science but can only be fully elaborated with the aid of phenomenological tools. However, both Dreyfus's descriptive model and his normative claims are flawed due to the lack of hermeneutical sensitivity. He assumes an expert's knowledge has crystallized out of contextual sensitivity plus experience, and that an expert has shed, during the training process, whatever prejudices, ideologies, hidden agendas, or other forms of cultural embeddedness, that person might have begun with. One would never imagine, from Dreyfus's account, that society could possibly be endangered by experts, only how society's expectations and actions could endanger experts. The stories of actual controversies not only shows things do not work the way Dreyfus claims, but also that it would be less salutary if they did. Such stories amount to counterexamples to Dreyfus's normative claims, and point to serious shortcomings in his arguments. (shrink)

When the modern administrative state emerged in America during the Progressive Era, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was typically grounded on the premise that administrative officials are experts who should be insulated from politics. This theory, combined with emerging ideas of scientific management, contributed to the intellectual justification for the administrative state. However, progressives never fully reconciled the tension between this theory and the democratic nature of American politics. Because of this ambiguity and tension in the progressives’ (...) theory of expertise, the politics/administration dichotomy was abandoned shortly after the administrative state was constructed. The place of expertise in the administrative state is still ambiguous, even in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for and addressing the need to do work that is socially and scientifically engaged. However, we currently lack well-developed frameworks for thinking about how we should engage other expert communities and what the epistemic benefits are of doing so. In this paper, I draw on Collins and Evans' concept of ‘interactional expertise’ – the ability to speak the language of a discipline in the absence of an ability to practice – to consider the (...) epistemic benefits that can arise when philosophers engage scientific communities. As Collins and Evans argue, becoming an interactional expert requires that one ‘hang out’ with members of the relevant expert community in order to learn crucial tacit knowledge needed to speak the language. Building on this work, I argue that acquiring interactional expertise not only leads to linguistic fluency, but it also confers several ‘socio-epistemic’ benefits such as the opportunity to cultivate trust with scientific communities. These benefits can improve philosophical work and facilitate the broader uptake of philosophers' ideas, enabling philosophers to meet a variety of epistemic goals. As a result, having at least some philosophers of science acquire interactional expertise via engagement will likely enhance the diversity of epistemic capacities for philosophy of science as a whole. For some philosophers of science, moreover, the socio-epistemic benefits identified here may be more important than the ability to speak the language of a discipline, suggesting the need for a broader analysis of interactional expertise, which this paper also advances. (shrink)

Today local, national and international ethics committees have become an effective means of social regulation in many European countries. Science itself is an important precondition for the development of bioethical knowledge and ethics expertise. Cultural, social, historical and religious preconditions can facilitate different forms and methods of ethics expertise in each country. Ukrainian ethics expertise has some methodological problems connected with its socio-cultural, historical, science and philosophy development particularities. In this context, clarification of some common (...) legitimacies or methodological approaches to ethics committee (EC) phenomena such as globalization, scientization and the prioritization of an ethics paradigm are very important. On the other hand, elaborate study and critical analysis of international experience by Ukraine and other Eastern European countries will provide the integration of their local and national ethics expertises into a world bioethics ethos. (shrink)

: The increasing reliance upon, and perhaps the growing public and professional skepticism about, the special expertise of bioethicists suggests the need to consider the limits of moral expertise. For all the talk about method in bioethics, we, bioethicists, are still rather far off the mark in understanding what we are doing, even when we may be going about what we are doing fairly well. Quite often, what is most fundamentally at stake, but equally often insufficiently acknowledged, are (...) inherently political, essentially contested visions of the most compelling and attractive forms of life for individuals and social organization. The current situation in bioethics parallels similar debates in eighteenth-century jurisprudence, especially Jeremy Bentham's withering critique of the prevalent forms of judicial argument and his own, equally unsuccessful, attempt to develop a decision-making procedure in ethics that would operate on a plane above politics. The risk, both then and now, is that we will fail to appreciate the wide range of reasonable disagreement that will remain past the point of extended reflection and discussion. (shrink)

Abstract The article addresses three aspects of the humanitarian intervention doctrine. It argues, first, that the value of sovereignty rests on the justified social processes of the target state ? the horizontal contract. Foreign interventions, even when otherwise justified, must respect the horizontal contract. In contrast, morally objectionable social processes (such as the subjection of women) are not protected by sovereignty (intervention, of course, may be banned for other reasons). In addition, tyrants have no moral protection against (...) interventions directed at them. Second, the article addresses the internal legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. It concludes that the liberal state may only use voluntary soldiers (either the voluntary army or mercenaries) to conduct humanitarian intervention. Conscription for that purpose is not permissible. The article shows that the long-standing criticism of mercenaries stems from a romantic prejudice and is thus unfair. Third, the article makes a distinction between intention (the determination to perform an action) and motive (a further goal that the agent seeks with that action) and shows that only intention is relevant for humanitarian intervention. A justified humanitarian intervention requires the intention to liberate the victims, but not necessarily a good further motive. It shows how mainstream doctrine has impermissibly confused the two concepts. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on the Mesoamerican institution of community offices (cargo) to support the view that political authority should be based on both political legitimacy and political expertise. I argue that the Mesoamerican tradition of cargos allows for a notion of political expertise that one acquires by rendering a service to one’s community. This expertise could be made a prerequisite for political representation without being vulnerable to several charges that have been levelled against epistocracy.

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subaltern forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a demarcationist focus obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, (...) transdisciplinary philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. (shrink)