Are Experts Representative of Non-Experts? Elective Modernism, Aspects of Representation, and the Argument from Inductive Risk

The approach to expert communities and political representation of non-experts in Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ elective modernism reflects the conviction that experts are not representative of ordinary citizens. I use an analysis of aspects of representation and the argument from inductive risk to argue that experts can be seen as representative of (some) non-experts, when we understand representation as resemblance based on shared social perspectives and acknowledge the inevitable involvement of such perspectives in decisions under inductive risk. This, in turn, has implications for some of the proposals about practices and institutions made in elective modernism.

Do democracies need knOWLedge?

This paper serves to review the book Why Democracies Need Science, written by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Of particular interest to this paper is the institution of The Owls, which Collins and Evans propose in their text. A theme which is present throughout the book, a theme which Collins and Evans seek to work through is that of post-truth; the first section of the paper will address the concept of post-truth. Next, the birds of science will be examined, in the second section; this is a classification system Collins and Evans develop, from a borrowed analogy from Richard Feynman. After examining the eagle scien-tists, the hawk scientific fundamentalists, and the vulture philosopher-apologists, attention will be paid to The Owls of science. The third section per-tains to The Owls. The Owls are an institution which Collins and Evans note and which includes social scientists and those with a rigorous under-standing of the social analysis of science [Collins, Evans, 2017, p. 78]. The role of The Owls is to serve to better advise politicians in a post-truth era. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the theorized institution of The Owls is an insufficient mechanism to deal with a post-truth era. After introducing The Owls, the fourth section of the paper considers the neutrality of an Owl, as a consensus does not guarantee truth or correctness. The fifth section then examines The Owls and democracy, as Collins and Evans do not specify the type of democracy in which The Owls would operate. The sixth section notes the exclusivity present within the institution of The Owls, as it is restricted to only two occupations, and is seemingly elitist. Finally, I conclude by asking the question – what does this mean for science and technology studies? As the institution of The Owls seems like an insufficient one to deal with a post-truth era.

El interferómetro de Michelson: entre el éter y las ondas gravitacionales

En este trabajo se presenta una reconstrucción de dos de los usos experimentales más sobresalientes del interferómetro de Michelson en la historia de la ciencia: la medición del éter (1881,1887) y la detección de las ondas gravitaciones (2015). A partir de las diferentes interpretaciones de estos dos momentos estelares en la física, relativos a un mismo dispositivo experimental, me propongo recuperar algunas afirmaciones del filósofo Paul Feyerabend respecto a la relación entre teoría y experiencia, las cuales se ilustran plausiblemente con estos ejemplos. Al mismo tiempo, incorporo elementos sociológicos y psicológicos explorados por Harry Collins en sus estudios sobre ondas gravitaciones que pueden ser integrados plausiblemente en tal perspectiva, si bien esto tipo de elementos no suelen ser utilizados por el filósofo austriaco.

Active and latent social groups and their interactional expertise

As a part of their normative theory of expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed that interactional expertise forms the third kind of knowledge, located between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skills. Interactional expertise refers to the capability to grasp the conceptual structure of another’s social world, and it is expressed as the ability to speak fluently the language spoken in that social world. According to their theory, it is a key concept of sociology, because it refers to the understanding and coordination of joint actions between members of different social groups. Collins and Evans have further claimed that minority social group members tend to outpace majority social group members in terms of interactional expertise. Drawing on ethnomethodology, we detail the ways in which interactional expertise is displayed and revealed in experiments. This allowed us to specify the underlying reasons for the distribution of interactional expertise between social groups. Our results indicate that the difference between the groups depends on whether a group is either actively maintained or a passive latent category, because interactional expertise provides for not only the crossing of social boundaries but also their maintenance. The minority social group members’ greater interactional expertise or competence is therefore proven to be illusory.

Cracking the Crystal in STS: Marcelo Fetz Talks with Harry Collins

In this interview, Harry Collins and Marcelo Fetz discuss Collins’ early work on the importance of tacit knowledge in laboratory research, the revolutionary spirit of early Science and Technology Studies (STS) research, and his concerns about its current intellectual decline which he sees as a result of the popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches and an increasing focus on policy-relevant STS studies. Collins describes how, in the early years of STS, he was part of a group of social scientists, interested in the analysis of scientific knowledge and practices, who immersed themselves in particular research fields, and then used their familiarity with science to develop radical new approaches to the topic. For him, the “interactional expertise” developed in such encounters is a key research tool––STS’s most effective means of generating compelling new ways of understanding science and technology––which should not be abandoned in favor of alternative approaches. In his following reflection, Marcelo Fetz considers the unifying conditions that were needed to “crack the crystal of science,” and the later problems resulting from the institutionalization of STS.