Stephen Turner

Evan Selinger’s review nicely captures the main concerns of my collection of essays, The Politics of Expertise. He raises an important question that is touched on in several essays but not fully developed: the problem of getting expert knowledge possessed by academics into something like public discussion or the public domain. This is of course only a part of the problem of expertise and the larger problem of knowledge in society. But it can be approached in more detail than was done in the book, in terms of the basic ideas of the book, and I will try to do that here. Much of what I will say deals with issues I have addressed in other places, so I will, rather tiresomely, cite myself, for those who wish more elaboration.

Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method has never enjoyed the same reputation as his major books, in part because the book is uncongenial to standard interpretations of Durkheim. In particular, its attacks on teleology do not fit his reputation as a functionalist The papers in this special issue address the work historically. Both Porter and Stedman Jones deal with aspects of the context in which Durkheim worked and transformed. Schmaus and Nemedi deal with problems of interpreting Durkheim's development, and Platt discusses the reception of The Rules. The papers shed light on such important questions as the meaning of Durkheim's slogan “society is made of representations.” Durkheim, it appears, was not only what would now be called a constructionist, he went on to ask whether the fact that constructions are real in their consequences did not imply the reality causal reality of constructions and, therefore, a specific kind of “social realism.” The problem The Rules poses, of what is the fundamental stuff of society, is “classic” in significance, and Durkheim's answer is classically radical.

“Science as a Vocation” describes an ideal of scholarship for a vanished world. Images of the past university still color our idea of the university. Weber dispelled illusions about the university of his own time, and pointed to its cruelty and irrationality. Veblen did something similar for the American university of his time, defended a similar ideal, and foresaw the effects of disciplinarization and the quantification of academic life. They both provide insights into the ways in which the autonomy of academic inquiry has been transformed, and the price that has been paid for the present forms of autonomy. But a consideration of these changes also reveals the reasons for the change in academic values over the last century and what has been lost.

The triangular relationship between the social, the political and the cultural has opened up social and political theory to new challenges. The social can no longer be reduced to the category of society, and the political extends beyond the traditional concerns of the nature of the state and political authority. This Handbook will address a range of issues that have recently emerged from the disciplines of social and political theory, focusing on key themes as opposed to schools of thought or major theorists. It is divided into three sections which address: the most influential theoretical traditions that have emerged from the legacy of the twentieth century the most important new and emerging frameworks of analysis today the major theoretical problems in recent social and political theory.

Practice Then and Now"Practice theory" has a long history in philosophy, under various names, but current practice theory is a response to failures of projects of modernity or enlightenment which attempt to reduce science or politics to formulae. Heidegger, Oakeshott, and MacIntyre are each examples of philosophers who turned to practice conceptions. Foucault and Bourdieu made similar turns. Practice accounts come in different forms: some emphasize skill-like individual accomplishments, others emphasize the social character or presupposition-like character of the tacit conditions of activities. The Social Theory of Practices problematized the idea of sameness, the idea that participants in an activity had the same tacit possessions, which undermined the idea that practices were collective objects in which individuals participated. Later critics, such as Schatzki and Rouse, emphasized the normative coherence and character of practice, which has a collective aspect. Pickering and others suggested a notion of practices that was de-mentalized and focused on the objects that were part of the practical activity, which provided for the continuity and sociality of practice without collectivizing its mental content. The discovery of mirror neurons suggested a non-collective mode of transmission of practices. The implications of these developments can be seen in connection with ethics, where the conflict between the ethical and the practical can be understood in terms of the intrinsic conflict between the need to behave successfully and our learned ethical intuitions.

Terry Nardin’s book on Oakeshott is an attempt to compare him to other 20th-century philosophers and to track the development of his philosophical thought. The project of comparison is made relevant by the fact that Oakeshott’s philosophy, like that of Heidegger and others, was the product of the dissolution of neo-Kantianism. Nardin stresses the idea of “modal confusion,” meaning responding to a question of one kind with an answer appropriate to another kind of inquiry, as a key to Oakeshott’s thought from Experience and Its Modes through to On Human Conduct itself, where Oakeshott changes his terminology. But why does Oakeshott change? One reason might be the critique of Oakeshott by Peter Winch, as Oakeshott appears to have reformulated his views in response to it in On Human Conduct, in the course of constructing an alternative to ‘conceptual analysis’ as practiced in contemporary Oxbridge

Walter Gulick criticizes The Social Theory of Practices for its non-Polanyian views of the problem of the objective character of tacit knowledge, its insistence that there should be plausible causal mechanisms that correspond to claims about tacit knowledge and its “social” transmission, and its denial of the social, telic character of practices. In this reply it is asserted that the demand for causally plausible mechanisms is not scientistic or for that matter non-Polanyian, that the book has a view of objectivity that parallels Polanyi’s own, and that the idea of telic practices is subject to the same problems over mechanism as non-telic ones, with the additional problem that telic concepts need supra-individual feedback mechanisms, of which no plausible examples exist. In each case, the non-social or personal explanations of the phenomenon of “practice” are better than the “social” ones. The discussion concludes by posing the challenge of connectionism to Polanyi, as well as the opportunity it presents.

The concept of worldviews gives a visual sense to the notion of a shared ideological frame, but misleadingly suppresses the visual itself. Against the standard image of worldviews, it is argued that the notion makes sense in connection with particular technologies of representation, notably newspapers, and is no longer informative about political beliefs. The example of Kristin Luker's work on abortion politics is used to show how weak the evidential base is for claims about worldviews. It is then argued that the kind of solidarity produced by ideological or `word', politics is different from the solidarities produced by the visual. Acts of political violence with strong visual representation produce sympathetic responses and are particularly effective in creating a sense of common victimhood. However, images also produce complex and conflicting responses that are less controllable. The visual impact of the World Trade Center attacks is a startling example of the differences between a politics of the eye and a politics of worldviews

Tacit knowledge is both a ubiquitous and puzzling notion, related to the idea of hidden assumptions. The puzzle is partly a result of the conflict between the idea that assumptions are in the mind and the apparent audience-relativity of the "fact" of possessing an assumption or of the tacit knowledge that is articulated. If we think of making the tacit explicit as constructing a certain kind of inference repairing explanation for a particular audience "on the fly" we come closer to an explanation of what happens when we "make our tacit knowledge explicit." We can account for our capacity to construct such statements for particular audiences by reference to our non-conceptual capacities to understand others. This approach avoids problematic assumptions about shared representations that are common in cognitive science, and the equally problematic notion that tacit knowledge is sentence-like content that we retrieve when we articulate something based on our tacit knowledge

Charles Perrow used the term normal accidents to characterize a type of catastrophic failure that resulted when complex, tightly coupled production systems encountered a certain kind of anomalous event. These were events in which systems failures interacted with one another in a way that could not be anticipated, and could not be easily understood and corrected. Systems of the production of expert knowledge are increasingly becoming tightly coupled. Unlike classical science, which operated with a long time horizon, many current forms of expert knowledge are directed at immediate solutions to complex problems. These are prone to breakdowns like the kind discussed by Perrow. The example of the Homestake mine experiment shows that even in modern physics complex systems can produce knowledge failures that last for decades. The concept of knowledge risk is introduced, and used to characterize the risk of failure in such systems of knowledge production.

Neil Gascoigne and Tim Thornton’s Tacit Knowledge is an attempt to find a place for tacit knowledge as “knowledge” within the limits of analytic epistemology. They do so by reference to Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s analysis of the term “way” and by the McDowell-like claim that reference to the tacitly rooted “way” of doing something exhausts the knowledge aspect of tacit knowledge, which preserves the notion of tacit knowledge, while excluding most of Michael Polanyi’s examples, and rendering Hubert Dreyfus’s and John Searle’s accounts irrelevant. This is more a redefinition of terms than an account of tacit knowledge

The phenomenon of expertise produces two problems for liberal democratic theory: the first is whether it creates inequalities that undermine citizen rule or make it a sham; the second is whether the state can preserve its neutrality in liberal ’government by discussion’ while subsidizing, depending on, and giving special status to, the opinions of experts and scientists. A standard Foucauldian critique suggests that neutrality is impossible, expert power and state power are inseparable, and that expert power is the source of the oppressive, inegalitarian effects of present regimes. Habermas argues that expert cultures make democratic discussion impossible. Analogous problems arise with ’cognitive authority’, understood in Mertonian terms. Cognitive authority, as Merton sees it, allows us to ask about the democratic legitimacy of this authority, which appears to solve the problem (or part of the problem) because it returns ultimate ’authority’ to the people, who reject or accept the experts’ claims. And many claims to expertise in fact do fail to gain acceptance. Through an examination of the type of expert that appears to evade the demands of legitimation, it is shown that expertise and liberal democracy can in principle co-exist, contrary to the claims of the critics