Redistributing and Rethinking Expertise - Michelle Sumovich

The concept of expertise is quite complex. What makes and expert? Education and credentials? Experience? Knowledge? Answering this question is significant because, in the world that we live in, we look to experts to point us in the right direction. Who is steering us toward the future, and what course are they taking? Several STS scholars have taken up the issue to determine how and at what rate the public, institutions, and government should be involved in this process. Moreover, should finding political legitimacy in science be a democratic process, or one that is left to the “experts.” Both papers this week (Collins & Evans and Whatmore) conclude that the public is capable of becoming more involved in the making of scientific issues, and that the time is now.

These articles help us realize that the political sphere rotates at a much more rapid pace than science and society. Yet issues within these two realms are constantly pulled into politics and filed through quickly and often without thorough investigation. For this reason, Whatmore encourages a slowing-down of reasoning, discouraging science from becoming caught up in the galloping pace of politics. She maps three forms of public involvement in scientific controversy: partisanship, demoscience, and competency groups. The first, partisanship, arms the public with enough knowledge to determine if the controversy is fair or weighted. Demoscience encourages the tracing of the web of involvement to investigate the living and non-living players causing and effected by a controversy. Finally, she refers to competency groups which are beginning to take shape in some democracies, in which panels are arranged between “experts” and the public to fold societal issues into science before science takes and institutional form.

Whatmore’s mapping of knowledge controversies appears to be akin to Collins’ three waves of science. His First Wave, characterized by the experts’ concern with remaining unbiased compliments Whatmore’s “partisanship.” When it becomes apparent that science cannot be partisan, Wave Two, or social constructivism, allows for Whatmore’s “demoscience” to take form, wherein the public has the resources to trace the form of controversy. Collins & Evans claim that Wave Three does not replace, but augments, Wave Two by granting public access to science before a consensus has been made. This certainly compliments the competency groups which Whatmore has mapped.

Early in their paper, Collins and Evans seem to establish that it is experience, the doing of some thing, which makes a person an expert. But they also imply that there is a myth that the doers have “special access to the truth” (236). Here they are recognizing that knowledge is mobilized through circulating reference (literature, lecture, media, maps, photos, etc), and the truth can be pieced together by non-experts...were they granted access to sufficient data. This addresses their “Problem of Legitimacy,” and ultimately the authors suggest that the answer to the “Problem of Extension” involves a relationship between a broad, interdisciplinary scientific community and the public in “all but specialist areas.” This concept is certainly akin to that of Whatmore’s.