They give you the keys and say ‘drive it!’ Managers, referred expertise, and other expertises

On the face of it, the directors of new large scientific projects have an impossible task. They have to make technical decisions about sciences in which they have never made a research contribution—sciences in which they have no contributory expertise. Furthermore, these decisions must be accepted and respected by the scientists who are making research contributions. The problem is discussed in two interviews conducted with two directors of large scientific projects. The paradox is resolved for the managers by their use of interactional and referred expertise. The same analysis might be applicable to management in general. An Appendix, co-authored with Jeff Shrager, compares the notion of referred expertise with contributory expertise.     

Bringing tacit knowledge back to contributory and interactional expertise: A reply to Goddiksen

We analyse a recent paper by Goddiksen (2014) where the author raises questions about the relationship between authorship, attribution and Collins & Evans' concept of contributory and interactional expertise. We then highlight recent empirical work in the sociology of climate change science that has made similar points in order to clarify how authorship, division of labour and contribution are handled in real scientific settings. Despite this, Goddiksen's critique of both contributory and interactional expertise is ultimately ineffective because it rests on a misguided attempt to de-socialise these concepts. We conclude by stressing the importance of collective tacit knowledge acquisition through immersion as a critical step in becoming a full-blown contributory or interactional expert.     

The evolution of BioBike: Community adaptation of a biocomputing platform

Programming languages are, at the same time, instruments and communicative artifacts that evolve rapidly through use. In this paper I describe an online computing platform called BioBike. BioBike is a trading zone where biologists and programmers collaborate in the development of an extended vocabulary and functionality for computational genomics. In the course of this work they develop interactional expertise with one another’s domains. The extended BioBike vocabulary operates on two planes: as a working programming language, and as a pidgin in the conversation between the biologists and engineers. The flexibility that permits this community to dynamically extend BioBike’s working vocabulary—to form new pidgins—makes BioBike unique among computational tools, which usually are not themselves adapted through the collaborations that they facilitate. Thus BioBike is itself a crucial feature—which it is tempting to refer to as a participant—in the developing interaction.     

Clarifying interactional and contributory expertise

This paper discusses the distinction between contributory expertise and interactional expertise developed by Harry Collins and Robert Evans over a series of publications. The distinction has been widely adopted and used to analyze the expertise of different groups of people, such as scientists, journalists and color blind. While the distinction is a fruitful tool to begin thinking about expertise in a more structured way, one also finds substantial inconsistencies and unnecessary vagueness in Collins and Evans' writings. Clarifying these issues will make the distinction an even more useful tool for analyzing expertise in science.     

Social networks and private spaces in economic forecasting

The outputs of economic forecasting—predictions for national economic indicators such as GDP, unemployment rates and inflation—are all highly visible. The production of these forecasts is a much more private affair, however, typically being thought of as the work of individual forecasters or forecast teams using their economic model to produce a forecast that is then made public. This conception over-emphasises the individual and the technical whilst silencing the broader social context through which economic forecasters develop the expertise that is essential for the credibility of their predictions. In particular, economic forecasts are given meaning and fine-tuned through the social and institutional networks that give forecasters access to the expertise of a heterogeneous mix of academics, policy-makers and business people. Within these broader groups, individual forecasters often create private forecast ‘clubs’, where subscribers have privileged access to the expertise of the economist, but where the forecasters also have privileged access to their clients’ own expert knowledge. In examining these aspects of the forecasters’ work I show that the visible and audible activities of modelling and forecasting are made possible and plausible by virtue of the modeller’s invisible interaction with a wider network.     

The role of interactional expertise in interpreting: the case of technology transfer in the steel industry

I analyse the case of three Japanese-Portuguese interpreters who have given support to technology transfer from a steel company in Japan to one in Brazil for more than thirty years. Their job requires them to be ‘interactional experts’ in steel-making. The Japanese–Portuguese interpreters are immersed in more than the language of steel-making as their job involves a great deal of ‘physical contiguity’ with steel-making practice. Physical contiguity undoubtedly makes the acquisition of interactional expertise easier. This draws attention to the lack of empirical work on the exact way that the physical and the linguistic interact in the acquisition of interactional expertise, or any other kind of expertise.     

Trading zones and interactional expertise

The phrase ‘trading zone’ is often used to denote any kind of interdisciplinary partnership in which two or more perspectives are combined and a new, shared language develops. In this paper we distinguish between different types of trading zone by asking whether the collaboration is co-operative or coerced and whether the end-state is a heterogeneous or homogeneous culture. In so doing, we find that the voluntary development of a new language community—what we call an inter-language trading zone—represents only one of four possible configurations. In developing this argument we show how different modes of collaboration result in different kinds of trading zone, how different kinds of trading zone may be ‘nested’ inside each other and discuss how a single collaboration might move between different kinds of trading zone over time. One implication of our analysis is that interactional expertise is a central component of at least one class of trading zone.     

Interactional expertise and embodiment

In this four part exchange, Evan Selinger starts by stating that Collins’s empirical evidence in respect of linguistic socialization and its bearing on artificial intelligence and expertise is valuable; it advances philosophical and sociological understanding of the relationship between knowledge and language. Nevertheless, he argues that Collins mischaracterizes the data under review and thereby misrepresents how knowledge is acquired and understates the extent to which expert knowers are embodied. Selinger reconstructs the case for the importance of the body in the initial acquisition of language and challenges Collins to show how a disembodied entity could become fluent in any language at all.Collins responds by accepting that his approach does not demonstrate quite as much about the irrelevance of the body as he thought it did but that even though he accepts all of Selinger’s claims, ‘the body’ as needed by the philosophical approach set out by Selinger is still a vestigial thing. Collins’s main point, however, is that the philosophical view of the body—the world is divided into embodied agents and unembodied entities—distracts attention from the more interesting empirically researchable question of how the ability to become socialized diminishes, if it does, as the body become more and more minimal. The right research question is not about whether a person can extrapolate from minimal sensory input but how much extrapolation is possible under different circumstances and how it is done.Dreyfus, having seen the whole of the exchange so far, agrees that both have a point but argues that Collins’s approach still misses the well established importance of bodily engagement for full understanding.Collins responds to this by trying to set out more clearly the position associated with the idea of interactional expertise.     

Instruments and rules: R. B. Woodward and the tools of twentieth-century organic chemistry

The paper illustrates how organic chemists dramatically altered their practices in the middle part of the twentieth century through the adoption of analytical instrumentation — such as ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy — through which the difficult process of structure determination for small molecules became routine. Changes in practice were manifested in two ways: in the use of these instruments in the development of ‘rule-based’ theories; and in an increased focus on synthesis, at the expense of chemical analysis. These rule-based theories took the form of generalizations relating structure to chemical and physical properties, as measured by instrumentation. This ‘Instrumental Revolution’ in organic chemistry was two-fold: encompassing an embrace of new tools that provided unprecedented access to structures, and a new way of thinking about molecules and their reactivity in terms of shape and structure. These practices suggest the possibility of a change in the ontological status of chemical structures, brought about by the regular use of instruments. The career of Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979) provides the central historical examples for the paper. Woodward was an organic chemist at Harvard from 1937 until the time of his death. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.     

Experiments with interactional expertise

‘Interactional expertise’ is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well socialized in the language of a specialist group is indistinguishable from those with full blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like.     

Primary source knowledge and technical decision-making: Mbeki and the AZT debate

Demands for public participation in technical decision-making are currently high on the agenda of Science & Technology Studies. It is assumed that the democratisation of technical decision-making processes generally leads to more socially desirable and acceptable outcomes. While this may be true in certain cases, this assumption cannot be generalised. I will discuss the case of the so-called ‘South African AZT debate’. The controversy started when President Thabo Mbeki, after reading some scientific papers on the toxicity of AZT, decided to bar the use of the drug in the public health sector as a means to reduce the transmission of HIV from mothers to children. While the scientific mainstream accepts the effectiveness of AZT in reducing the risk of vertical HIV transmission, a few maverick scientists reject the clinical evidence and argue that the risks of using AZT by far outweigh its benefits. Based on various textual sources and using the ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’ developed by Collins and Evans, Mbeki’s expertise at the time of his intervention into the technical question whether AZT is a medicine or a poison can be classified as primary source knowledge. It is shown that this type of expertise is insufficient for technical decision-making. Mbeki’s primary source knowledge legitimated his presentation of the claims of maverick scientists as a serious contribution to the debate—with tragic consequences for tens of thousands of babies.     

Expertise revisited,Part II: Contributory expertise

In Part I of this two part paper we tried to elicit the ‘essence’ of the notion of interactional expertise by looking at its origins. In Part II we will look at the notion of contributory expertise. The exercise has been triggered by recent discussion of these concepts in this journal by Plaisance and Kennedy and by Goddiksen.     

Expertise revisited,Part I—Interactional expertise

In Part I of this two part paper we try to set out the ‘essence’ of the notion of interactional expertise by starting with its origins. In Part II we will look at the notion of contributory expertise. The exercise has been triggered by recent discussion of these concepts in this journal by Plaisance and Kennedy and by Goddiksen.     

Hensen's node — The ’Organizer’ of the amniote embryo

Conclusion If the hundred years of study on theHensen's node — i.e. on gastrulation and early determination of the embryos of amniote vertebrates — teach anything, they teach in the first place how limited and fragmentary our knowledge is about one of the most central problems of the whole developmental biology. We know that the events in early amniote development — or early avian development, on which our data and ideas are nearly all based — in many ways resemble those in early Amphibian development, which is only slightly better understood, but we also know that direct extrapolations from anamniotes to amniotes cannot be made without proper reservations and without studying the amniote embryos themselves. And we have practically no idea of what is really going on in the cells of the blastoderm when they move, invaginate, induce or are induced, interact, become determined and begin their differentiation. We know that at the stages of gastrulation, the node, and indeed the whole blastoderm, is in a very labile state and can be regulated in many ways to produce a harmonious whole — or a monster — although we only understand very poorly the modes of this regulation. The progress made during the decades, and particularly in recent years, shows, however, that useful information is accumulating to produce a coherent picture, and there is no reason to be pessimistic.Dedicated to ProfessorEtienne Wolff on the occasion of his retirement.     

Prevention of experimental liver metastases by D-galactose

Summary The metastasis of malignant tumors from a primary site to near and distant secondary sites is probably the most important event in the pathogenesis of cancer and it accounts for most cancer deaths¹. Whereas advances in the treatment of primary cancer have led to increased patient survival, metastatic cancers are still the most difficult group of diseases to treat successfully². As organ-characteristic lectins play an important role in the organ manifestation of metastatic islets^3,4, it might be possible (e.g. during surgical operations on malignant tumors) to block those organ-characteristic lectins with the appropriate receptor-bearing glycoconjugates in order to inhibit the metastatic spread. Recent experiments have demonstrated that neuraminidase treatment of tumor cells (mouse sarcoma-1) alters in vivo (Balb/c-mice) the organotropic distribution of metastases; instead of being found exclusively in the lung, they are found both in lung and liver. However, pre-injection and regular application of D-galactose — the same holds for arabinogalactan^5,6,13 — prevents the settling of metastases in the liver but does not influence the metastatic process to the lung, whereas mannan — as a galactose-free control substance — does not alter the initial pattern of metastasis to lung and liver.     

The matches,achieved by natural selection,between biological capacities and their natural loads

Natural selection tends to eliminate unutilized capacities because of their costs. Hence we ask how large are the reserve capacities by which biological capacities exceed natural loads, and how closely are related biological capacities matched to each other. Measured capacities (V_max values) of small intestinal brush-border nutrient transporters are typically around twice their natural loads (dietary intakes of their substrates); the ratio is higher for a transporter of a hyperessential nutrient. Preliminary evidence suggests matching of capacities between different steps in carbohydrate metabolism, and between the intestine, liver, kidneys, and spleen. Symmorphosis — the postulated matching of capacities to each other and to loads — is a testable hypothesis of economic design, useful in detecting and explaining cases of apparently uneconomic design.     

Response to one point in Gingras’s review of Gravity’s shadow

Yves Gingras says of my book Gravity’s shadow that it is too long, the style is poor, and in its 870 pages there is nothing new that is not to be regretted. Gingras’s purity of vision would be a cause for congratulation were it not for the appalling implications of one of his claims. For the sake of the future of social science—indeed for the sake of the future of civilisation—it is impossible to leave unchallenged the idea that respondents, who don’t like to see their use of data questioned, are to be commended when they withhold those data from public scrutiny.     

Setting up a Discipline: Conflicting Agendas of the Cambridge History of Science Committee, 1936–1950

Traditionally the domain of scientists, the history of science became an independent field of inquiry only in the twentieth century and mostly after the Second World War. This process of emancipation was accompanied by a historiographical departure from previous, ‘scientistic’ practices, a transformation often attributed to influences from sociology, philosophy and history. Similarly, the liberal humanists who controlled the Cambridge History of Science Committee after 1945 emphasized that their contribution lay in the special expertise they, as trained historians, brought to the venture. However, the scientists who had founded the Committee in the 1930s had already advocated a sophisticated contextual approach: innovation in the history of science thus clearly came also from within the ranks of scientists who practised in the field. Moreover, unlike their scientist predecessors on the Cambridge Committee, the liberal humanists supported a positivistic protocol that has since been criticized for its failure to properly contextualize early modern science. Lastly, while celebrating the rise of modern science as an international achievement, the liberal humanists also emphasized the peculiar Englishness of the phenomenon. In this respect, too, their outlook had much in common with the practices from which they attempted to distance their project.     

Legend naturalism and scientific progress: An essay on Philip Kitcher's : The advancement of science

Philip Kitcher's The Advancement of Science sets out, programmatically, a new naturalistic view of science as a process of building consensus practices. Detailed historical case studies—centrally, the Darwinian revolutio—are intended to support this view. I argue that Kitcher's expositions in fact support a more conservative view, that I dub ‘Legend Naturalism’. Using four historical examples which increasingly challenge Kitcher's discussions, I show that neither Legend Naturalism, nor the less conservative programmatic view, gives an adequate account of scientific progress. I argue for a naturalism that is more informed by psychology and a normative account that is both more social and less realist than the views articulated in The Advancement of Science.     

The evidential significance of thought experiment in science

The most promising way to regard thought experiment is as a species of experiment, alongside concrete experiment. Of the authors who take this view, many portray thought experiment as possessing evidential significance intrinsically. In contrast, concrete experiment is nowadays most convincingly portrayed as acquiring evidential significance in a particular area of science at a particular time in consequence of the persuasive efforts of scientists. I argue that the claim that thought experiment possesses evidential significance intrinsically is contradicted by the history of science. Thought experiment, like concrete experiment, has evidential significance only where particular assumptions—such as the Galilean doctrine of phenomena—are taken to hold; under alternative premises, in themselves equally defensible, thought experiment is evidentially inert.