Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction by Jamie Carlin Watson;

Author:Jamie Carlin Watson;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

6 SOCIAL ROLE ACCOUNTS OF EXPERTISE

My dear Mrs. Alving, there are many occasions in life when one must rely upon others. Things are so ordered in this world; and it is well that they are. Otherwise, what would become of society?

(Pastor Manders in Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, Act One, 1881/1888, trans. William Archer)

In this chapter, I introduce the role of society in shaping both our understanding of expertise and experts’ role in directing our lives. After distinguishing reputational from objective accounts of expertise (6.2), I review three social role accounts that purport to be objective: the “constructivist” account of Neil Agnew, Kenneth Ford, and Patrick Hayes (1994) (6.3), what I call the “public influence” account of Stephen Turner (2014) (6.4), and what Harry Collins calls the “social acquisition of tacit knowledge” account (2014: 61) (6.5). After exploring some criticisms of Collins’s account (6.6), I close by highlighting how insights from social role theories might inform a general theory of expertise.

6.1 What Does Society Have to Do with Expertise?

So far, we have discussed expertise in largely individual terms—someone’s cunning intelligence, someone’s knowledge, someone’s superior performance. But there is an important sense in which our epistemic community (people both inside and outside a domain) shapes what it means to be an expert and how expertise develops. There are at least two senses of “shaping expertise” at work here, and it is important to keep them separate.

In one sense, because some scholars treat “expert” and “professional” synonymously, what counts as expertise is artificially determined by whatever arbitrary profession someone defines—administrative assistant, associate vice president, social impact and community engagement coordinator, and so on. On these views, being able to do the job of an administrative assistant is tantamount (because one is a professional in that domain) to being an expert administrative assistant. The implication is that society shapes expertise by defining expertise in terms of being able to do a certain set of tasks. This is a rather minimal sense of “shaping expertise,” as it does little more than define a domain. But it is also misleading, since simply being able to do one of these jobs is different from being highly competent in them. And not all of these jobs admit of expertise (because some tasks do not admit of expertise—walking the dog, getting the mail, etc.). To equate expert with professional undermines the distinction between basic and advanced know-how. Thus, this is not what I mean in this chapter when I say that society shapes expertise.

In another sense, domains become domains of expertise precisely because humans pay attention to them. Who would have thought that using brooms and buckets to make noise could be a domain of expertise? And yet the performance group STOMP has made it a specialized art. The implication of this is quite subtle. It means that domains are not made up solely of claims, practices, and methodologies; they also include how experts talk about their domain, what they find interesting or meaningful. How they weigh the significance of some of those claims.

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