Scientists Know Better Than You--Even When They're Wrong
Like Jane Goodall living among the chimps, Collins, a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, has spent 30 years observing physicists who study gravitational wave detection--the search for faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime. He's learned the hard way about the work that goes into acquiring specialized scientific knowledge. In a recent book, Rethinking Expertise, he says that what bridges the gap--and what keeps science working--is something called "interactional expertise". Collins spoke recently with ScientificAmerican.com about his view of expertise; what follows is an edited transcript of that interview.
The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area--tacit knowledge is know-how that you can't express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge. Is this where interactional expertise comes into play? Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It's a little bit wider than the old "people in the white coats" of the 1950s, but what it's not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn't run without it.) You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find? The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group--but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group--you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
Is this where interactional expertise comes into play? Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It's a little bit wider than the old "people in the white coats" of the 1950s, but what it's not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn't run without it.)
You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find? The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group--but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group--you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
This cuts deep into some convictions I have about epistemology and philosophy of language. There are no categorical limitations to understanding, and our discourse is rich enough to render any 'foreign' conception.
Experts are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing. keep to the Fen Causeway
That's why I go on beer tours with Helen - it's purely the status boost of hanging out with an expert.
And I'd like a pink pony.
Meanwhile in the real world, expertise is measured almost exclusively by media noise - at the big media scale, and also at the small science scale, where you can talk crap and still be published in peer reviewed papers, and you can have some original ideas which never make it past peer review.
So what is an expert, exactly? And how can you tell the difference (if you're not a chicken)?
I think I'm confused about who I'm supposed to be scorning.
