The Crisis of Expertise

Gil Eyal, Gil Eyal

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745665788, 9780745665771
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word "experts" from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts' many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the "death of expertise, " or is the handwringing about an "assault on science" merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites?

In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided "mistrust of experts" but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The "scientization of politics, " of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture.

This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.

1
Expertise

In 1891, John Earle, the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, surveyed the transformation of English prose, how certain words and usages decline and new ones take their place. The best kinds of “word coining,” he noted, are like “spring blossoms … too slight, delicate and ephemeral.” The coinage is so subtle and promptly adopted that with a couple of iterations readers no longer notice it is a new word. The opposite happened with a “more robust and coarser sort” of word invention, more jarring and strange to the ears of readers, who couldn't fail to recognize its novelty. Among this latter sort he counted “carnalization” (the diversion of human aspirations from spiritual to material concerns), “criticaster” (for critics who are fond of praising the dead at the expense of the living) and “dispeace” (conflict). And then there was also “expertise.” He quoted its appearance in an article in The Times on March 20, 1876 as another example of this clumsier sort of word coining, easily recognizable as an innovation and somewhat artificial and discordant to the ear.¹

More than a century later, a Google search of “expertise” returns 359 million entries in 0.3 seconds. Whatever the damage it originally inflicted on Earle's delicate ear, expertise is evidently no longer an innovation; evidently, it is one of the keywords of our time. It is at the center of many lively and vigorous debates, projects and explorations. There is a “philosophy of expertise,” a “psychology of expertise,” and the obligatory “neuroscience of expertise.” There is an avid debate about the “politics of expertise.” There is a huge legal literature about who can claim expertise when testifying as expert witness, and a no less voluminous sociological and anthropological literature on expertise as a social phenomenon including also “lay expertise.” Finally, there is an immense mountain of investigations, articles, books, and experiments concerning the nature of expertise and how it may be developed, at the intersection of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and management theory.²

In the process, the meaning of “expertise” has undergone a subtle change. “Expertise” was adopted into the English language from the French, where it meant not something that one possesses, but something that one does. Une expertise is translated to English as appraisal, evaluation, valuation; while the English word “expertise” is translated to the French as compétences. In the late nineteenth century, British merchants shipping their wares across the Channel took their disputes with the French Customs Authority to Court. They were incensed to find out, however, that the Court ordered une expertise to be conducted – namely an appraisal of the class, origin, quality, and value of their merchandise – by local “experts,” who were none other than their very competitors, French merchants and manufacturers. When first taken up into English, “expertise” still meant something that experts do, such as an inspection of handwriting to determine the authenticity of a document; determining the authorship of a painting; estimating the value of a piece of land; or an examination by a medical doctor to determine cause of death, sanity, or other medico-legal questions. This original French meaning was still evident in various English language usages well into the first decades of the twentieth century. A 1936 edition of Mencken's The American Language still refers to a verb, “to expertise … meaning a survey or valuation by experts” and reports that it “is in universal use among American art or antique dealers.” At the same time, however, the word began to acquire a new meaning through slippage from designating the procedure of inspection or appraisal to a shorthand for the training and experience of the specialist conducting these. It was, finally, in the course of discussions in the 1920s that “expertise” came to mean narrow, specialized, technical knowhow as opposed to generalist judgment. But even then it was hardly in common parlance. When people wanted to speak about technical knowhow, or about what experts possessed, they were just as likely to use “expertness” (and “inexpertness”), however awkward it may now sound to us.³

In short, “expertise” is really a very recent word. As the reader can see in Figure 1, “expertise” finally came into widespread use only in the 1960s, when discussion about “expertise” exploded, increasing by a whopping 4,300 percent from 1955 to 2000. Over the same period, in comparison, the appearance of the word “expert” has only increased by about 30 percent, while the appearance of the term “professions” in books and articles actually declined somewhat. Expertise, in fact, is so recent that Mandarin Chinese, while it has an equivalent for “expert” (專家 zhuan jia) and can capture some of its meanings as “expert topic” (專題 zhuan ti) or “specialized knowledge” (專門知識 zhuan men zhi shi), does not yet have a direct translation to “expertise” that captures its multifold meanings.⁴

Figure 1 Frequency of appearance of “expertise,” “expert,” and “professions” in Google Books from 1800 to 2000⁵

Why this sudden interest in expertise? Why did we not have much use for a word designating the specialized skills that experts possess in, say, 1880, but now seem unable to do without it? What kind of societal transformation has suddenly necessitated this word? I am confident that the increased usage of “expertise” is symptomatic. It is not idle fashion or mere figure of speech. But symptomatic of what? It is tempting to conjecture that it probably reflects the transformation of modern society from an industrial into a post-industrial “knowledge society” or indeed an “expert society.” Surely, the explosion of interest in expertise reflects awareness of the outsized role that experts and “expert systems” have come to play in our politics, our economy, indeed our everyday life.⁶ I am not convinced by this explanation. It is too facile. After all, as can be seen in Figure 1, we have been talking about them, about the “experts,” for quite a while. More importantly, the whole idea that a certain word “reflects” what is happening in society is sloppy. The question should really be about pragmatics – how the term is used – while taking into account the historical context of usage: Who was talking? To whom? For what purpose? What work did the word “expertise” do in this context that other words (like “expert” or “profession”) did not? When the question is posed this way, it becomes immediately clear that the word “expertise” is useful when one is asking what makes someone an expert, or how to distinguish experts from non-experts, or whether a particular claim to the status of expert is legitimate. To put it simply: when it is fairly clear who the experts are, and how to recognize them, there is little need for a word like “expertise,” for a substance noun identifying what makes one an expert. The need only arises when these matters are not clear-cut or when one would like to question them.

Let me give an example that hopefully will clarify this point, while also advancing the argument. After scouring the literature and following all the leads provided by Google Ngram, I am fairly confident that the first instance when “expertise” was at the center of a focused discussion was in the course of legal debate in the United States about the limits of judicial review and the deference that should be accorded to the decisions of administrative agencies. While this debate began a few years before Roosevelt's election, it became part of the struggle over the New Deal and continued well into the 1940s. The main bones of contention were the independent commissions created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 – the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and so on. New Dealers wanted the deliberations of these agencies to be generally immune to judicial review because they were “applying trained specialized judgment to evidence of a technical character,” and therefore should not “be subjected to revision by a non-expert body.” In short, they were claiming for the commissions the same status as human experts, into whose judgment the courts typically did not inquire. Mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Expertise
• 2: The Debate about Expertise
• 3: Trust
• 4: Risk
• 5: Crisis, Take 2
• 6: Inside the Vortex
• 7: Balaam's Blessing
• Conclusions
• Index
• End User License Agreement