The Politics of Expertise

Stephen P. Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134644230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This book collects case studies and theoretical papers on expertise, focusing on four major themes: legitimation, the aggregation of knowledge, the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power. It focuses on the institutional means by which the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power are connected, and how the problems of aggregating knowledge and legitimating it are solved by these structures. The radical novelty of this approach is that it places the traditional discussion of expertise in democracy into a much larger framework of knowledge and power relations, and in addition begins to raise the questions of epistemology that a serious account of these problems requires.

Part I

Some Basic Theory

1 What Is the Problem with Experts?¹

Discussions of expertise and expert power typically have “political implications,” but the underlying political thinking that gives them these implications is rarely spelled out.¹ In what follows I will break down the problem of expertise to its elements in political theory. The first problem arises from social theory, and concerns democracy and equality. In the writings of persons concerned with the political threat to democracy posed by the existence of expert knowledge, expertise is treated as a kind of possession which privileges its possessors with powers that the people cannot successfully control, and cannot acquire or share in.

Understood in this way, expertise is a problem because it is a kind of violation of the conditions of rough equality presupposed by democratic accountability. Some activities, such as genetic engineering, are apparently out of the reach of democratic control (even when these activities, because of their dangerous character, ought to be subject to public scrutiny and regulation) precisely because of imbalances in knowledge, simply because “the public,” as a public, cannot understand the issues. This is not to say that democratic actions cannot be taken against these activities, but they are necessarily actions beyond the genuine competence of those who are acting. So we are faced with the dilemma of capitulation to “rule by experts” or democratic rule which is “populist”—that is to say, that valorizes the wisdom of the people even when “the people” are ignorant and operate on the basis of fear and rumor.

The second problem arises from normative political theory. Regarding differences in knowledge as a problem of equality leads in some troubling directions. If we think of knowledge as a quantity, or a good to which some have access and others do not, the solution, admittedly one with practical limitations, is egalitarianization through difference-obliterating education or difference-obliterating access to expertise, for example through state subsidy of experts and the dissemination of their knowledge and advice.² But if the differences are better understood as differences in viewpoint rather than differences in quantities of knowledge, then we have another problem. Paul Feyerabend (1978: 73–76) insisted that a program of extensive public “science education” is merely a form of state propaganda for a faction, the faction of “experts.” Thus it is a violation of the basic neutrality of the state, of the impartiality the liberal state must exhibit in the face of rival opinions in order to ensure the possibility of genuine, fair, and open discussion. This second issue may seem to be a marginal issue, of interest only to fanatics, but increasingly it has become a practical problem.

The abstract form of the problem is this: if the liberal state is supposed to be neutral with respect to opinions—in other words it neither promotes nor gives special regard to any particular beliefs, world views, sectarian positions, and so on—what about expert opinions? Do they have some sort of special properties that sectarian opinions lack? If not, why should the state give them special consideration, for example through the subsidization of science, or by treating expert opinions about environmental damage differently than the opinions of landowners or polluters? If they do have special status, what is it? The special status granted to religious opinion leads to its exclusion from the domain of state action. Religion is either not an acceptable subject of state action, or is granted a protected status of limited autonomy, as in the case of the established church in England, in exchange for the church’s renunciation of politics. The status of religion has often been proposed as a model for the state’s relation to science (Polanyi [1946] 1964: 59; Price 1965). But it is a peculiar analogy, because the state not only protects and subsidizes science, it attends to the opinions of science, which is to say it grants science a kind of authority, and reaffirms this authority by requiring that regulations be based on the findings of science or on scientific consensus, and by promoting the findings of science as fact.

With respect to religion, then, the state attempts some form of neutrality, if only by separating the two and delegating to churches authority over special topics or special rights. With science, and more generally with “expert” opinion, it is the opinions themselves that are treated as being “neutral.” This special status becomes problematic when admittedly “sectarian” beliefs come into conflict with expert opinion and the non-sectarian neutral character of expert opinion is called into question. Problems of this sort have occurred, for example, in connection with the teaching of creationism throughout the twentieth century in the US. But the issues here are more easily ridiculed than solved. For problems like “is ‘creation science’ really ‘science’?” there are no very convincing answers in principle, and no “principles” on which to rely that cannot themselves be attacked as ideological. Nor is the problem limited to sectarian beliefs. Research on the genetic background of criminals has been denounced as “racist” and government agencies have been intimidated into withdrawing support. Studies of race and intelligence, similarly, have been attacked as inherently racist, or “non-neutral.” A letter writer to Newsweek wrote that “theories of intelligence, the test to measure it and the societal structures in which its predictions come true are all developed and controlled by well-off white males for their own benefit” (Jaffe 1994: 26). The idea that science itself, with its mania for quantification, prediction and control, is merely an intellectual manifestation of racism and sexism—that is to say, is non-neutral—is not only widespread, it is often treated in feminist theory as a given. There is a more general problem for liberalism that arises from this: if the liberal state is supposed to be ideologically neutral, how is it to decide what is and is not ideology as distinct from knowledge?

The Two Issues Together

If the two issues, equality and neutrality, are each taken on their own terms, they can be discussed in a mundane political way. The solution to the problem of experts uncontrolled by democracy is to devise controls such as the citizens councils on technology that have been started in Denmark; the solution to a public incapable of keeping up with the demands of the modern world is to educate it better, a traditional aim of scientists, economists and others, for whom “public understanding” is central. The problem with liberal democracy created by expert knowledge doesn’t need a fancy solution; we can continue to do what we do now, which is to “muddle through.” For example, we may just declare science to be non-sectarian and deal with oddities like creation science by judicial fiat, or decline to fund science, or to permit or reject technology that has controversial implications or arouses the antagonism of “public interest” groups on the basis of public opinion and political expedience. Taken together, however, the two problems raise a more difficult question: if experts are the source of the public’s knowledge, and this knowledge is not essentially superior to unaided public opinion, not genuinely expert, then the “public” itself is presently not merely less competent than the experts, but is also more or less under the cultural or intellectual control of the experts.

This idea, inspired by Michel Foucault, is perhaps the dominant leitmotif in present “cultural studies,” and informs its historiography: the ordinary consumer of culture is taken to be the product of mysterious forces that constrain them into thinking in racist, sexist and “classist” ways. These constraints are, so to speak, imbibed along with cultural products. In Donna Haraway’s famous (but disputed) example, a person exposed to an “expert” representation of human evolution at a natural history museum, in which the more advanced people have features that resemble modern Europeans, becomes a racist and a sexist (Haraway 1984–85; Schudson 1997). It is now widely taken for granted that this kind of effect of expertise is the true realm of “politics,” and that politics as traditionally understood is subordinate to—because it is conducted within the frame defined by—cultural givens, which themselves originate in part in the opinions of “experts” in the past, such as the presentations of museum dioramas. It is this general form of argument that I wish to examine here from the perspective of liberal political theory, for it is to liberal political theory, as opposed to liberal politics, that this cultural argument poses a challenge.

A standard view of liberalism, perhaps most pungently expressed by Carl Schmitt, takes it to be the product of the lessons of early modern Europe’s wars of religion. Liberal politics developed, where it did develop, as the consequence of the adoption of a certain kind of convention: matters of religion were agreed to be outside of the domain of the political. The domain of the political was reduced, de facto, to the domain of opinions about which people could agree to disagree, to tolerate, and further agree to accept the results of parliamentary debate and voting in the face of disagreement. It was also implicitly understood that some matters, such as matters of fact, were not subject to “debate,” but were the common possession of, and could be appealed to by, all sides in the course of public discussion. Schmitt made the point that parliamentary democracy depended on the possibility of “persuading one’s opponents through argument of the truth or justice of something, or allowing oneself to be persuaded of something as true or just” ([1923] 1988: 5). Without some such appeal—if opinions were not amenable to change through discussion, and persuasion was simply a form of the negotiation of compromises between pre-established interests—parliamentary institutions would be meaningless shells. What Schmitt saw in the parliamentary politics of the Weimar era was that this assumption of parliamentarism no longer held. Rational persuasion with respect to what is true or just had ceased. The parties of Weimar politics, however, were more than mere interest parties. They were “totalizing” parties that construed the world ideologically, ordered the life experiences and social life of their members, and rejected the world-views of other parties and all the arguments that depended on these other world-views.

Schmitt believed that the former historical domain of parliamentary discussion, in which genuine argument was possible, had simply vanished. The world of totalitarianism, of the rule of totalizing parties, had begun. He didn’t say that the liberal idea of parliamentary government, government by discussion, was wrong in principle. But there is a currently influential argument from principle that has the same conclusion. Stanley Fish has recently claimed that liberalism is “informed by a faith (a word deliberately chosen) in reason as a faculty that operates independently of any particular world view” (1994: 134). Fish denies that this can be anything more than a faith, and concludes that this means that liberalism doesn’t exist. This is an argument, in effect, for undoing the central achievement of the modern state and unlearning the lessons of the wars of religion. But it is a curiously compelling argument nevertheless, especially if it is conjoined with the idea that the major products of the modern liberal state have been racial and gender inequity and injustice.

Expert knowledge is susceptible to a variant of this argument: expert knowledge masquerades as neutral fact, accessible to all sides of a debate; but it is merely another ideology. Jürgen Habermas makes this charge implicitly when he speaks of “expert cultures.” Many other critics of past experts, influenced by Foucault, have substantiated this claim in great detail. Their point, typically, is that “expert” claims or presentations of reality by experts have produced discursive structures—“ideologies”—that were unwittingly accepted by ordinary people and politicians as fact, but were actually expressions of patriarchy, racism, and the like. Present-day “expertise” raises the same problems: the difference is that we lack the historical distance to see the deeper meaning of the claims of experts.

If it is true that expert knowledge is “ideology” taken as fact, the idea of liberal parliamentary discussion is, intellectually at least, a sham. The factual claims on the basis of which parliamentary discussion is possible are exposed as ideological. The true ideological basis of liberalism is thus hidden: it is really what is agreed to be fact, and what is agreed to be fact is, some of the time, the product not of open debate but of the authority of experts. The actual discussions in parliament and before the electorate are conducted within the narrow limits imposed by what is agreed to be fact, and therefore, indirectly, by expert opinion. To accept the authority of science or experts is thus to accept authoritative ideological pronouncements. So liberal regimes are no less ideological than other regimes; rather, the basis of liberal regimes in ideological authority is concealed under a layer of doctrinal self-deception.

These two problems—the problem of the character of expert knowledge, which undermines liberalism, and the problem of the inaccessibility of expert knowledge to democratic control—thus combine in a striking way. We are left with a picture of modern democratic regimes as shams, with a public whose culture and life-world are controlled or “steered” by experts whose doings are beyond public comprehension (and therefore beyond intelligent public discussion), but whose “expert” knowledge is nothing but ideology, ideology made more powerful by virtue of the fact that its character is concealed. This concealment is the central legacy of liberalism. The public, indeed, is its pitiful and ineffective victim.

Habermas gives a version of the social-theoretical argument that suggests why the usual solutions to these two problems, of neutrality and democracy, fail. The argument depends on a characterization of the viewpoint of ordinary people, which he calls “the internal perspective of the life-world.” This perspective, he claims, is governed by three fictions: that actors are autonomous beings; that culture is independent of external restraints; and that communication is “transparent,” by which he means that everyone can, in principle, understand everyone else (Habermas [1985] 1987: 149–50). But in fact, he argues, the life-world is the product, at least in part, of external controls, which he calls “steering mechanisms,” operated by experts whose thinking is not comprehensible within the traditions that are part of, and help to constitute, the life-world. There is an unbridgeable cultural gap, in short, between the world of illusions under which the ordinary member of the public operates and the worlds of “expert cultures” (Habermas [1985] 1987: 397). The fictions of the life-world themselves prevent its denizens from grasping the manner in which it is controlled.

Robert Merton expresses a related point in a different way, with the notion that professionals and scientists possess “cognitive authority.” Presumably Habermas has many of the same people in mind when he refers to “expert cultures,” but there is an important difference in the way the two conceive of the problem. Habermas’s experts don’t exert their influence by persuasion, but rather by manipulating conditions of social existence (especially to manufacture a kind of unthinking satisfaction), which Habermas calls “colonizing the life-world.” Merton’s model, the relation of authority, is more familiar. Merton adds that this authority is experienced as a kind of alien power against which people sometimes rebel—the coexistence of acceptance and rebellion he calls “ambivalence” (Merton 1976: 26).

Authority is, in its most common form, a political concept, and it points to the problem posed by expertise for the theory of democracy. Experts are not democratically accountable, but they nevertheless exercise authority-like powers over questions of true belief. Habermas’s picture is somewhat different: the experts he seems to be concerned with are not professionals whom we deal with often in a face-to-face way, but policymakers hidden behind a wall of bureaucracy. Whether this difference is significant is a question that I will leave open for the moment. But it points to some difficulties with the concept of expertise itself that need to be more fully explored.

Expertise thus is a more complicated affair than my original formulations supposed. Cognitive authority, whatever it is, seems to be open to resistance and submission, but not to the usual compromises of democratic politics. It is not an object that can be distributed, nor can it be simply granted—so that everyone can be treated as an “expert” for the sake of service on a committee evaluating risks, for example. To be sure, legal fictions of equality can be extended to such political creations as citizens’ oversight committees, and legal fictions have non-fictive consequences that may be very powerful. But cognitive authority is likely to elude such bodies, for reasons pinpointed by Habermas: the limitations of the perspective of the life-world preclude communicative equality between expert and non-expert.

Construed in either way, expertise is trouble for liberalism. If experts possess Mertonian cognitive authority, they pose a problem for neutrality: can the state preserve its independent authority, its power to act as neutral judge, for example, in the face of the authoritative claims of experts? Or must it treat them as inherently non-sectarian or neutral? Experts in bureaucracies pose a somewhat different but no less troubling problem. If we think of the distinctively German contribution to liberalism as the idea that official discretionary powers ought to be limited as much as possible— the ideal of a state of laws, not of men—it is evident that “experts” have an apparently irreducible role precisely in those places in the state apparatus that discretionary power exists. Indeed, expertise and discretionary power are notions that are made for one another.

Cognitive Authority and its Legitimacy

“Authority” is a peculiar concept to use in conjunction with “knowledge”: in political theory one usually thinks of authority in contrast to truth, as for example Schmitt does when he paraphrases Hobbes as saying that authority, not truth, makes law. By authority Schmitt means the effective power to make and enforce decisions. Cognitive authority is, in these terms, an oxymoron. If you have knowledge, one need not have authority. But it is a nice analogue to “moral authority.” And there is of course an earlier, and perhaps more fundamental, notion of auctoritas as authorship. The underlying thought is that the “authority” has at first hand something that others—subjects or listeners—get at second hand. And this is part of the notion of expertise as well: the basis on which experts believe in the facts or validity of knowledge claims of other experts of the same type they believe in is different from the basis on which non-experts believe in the experts. The facts of nuclear physics, for example, are “facts,” in any real sense (facts that one can use effectively, for example), only to those who are technically trained in such a way as to recognize the facts as facts, and do something with them. The non-expert is not trained in such a way as to make much sense of them: accepting the predigested views of physicists as authoritative is basically all that even the most sophisticated untrained reader can do. The point may be made very simply in the terms given by Schmitt: it is the character of expertise that only other experts may be persuaded by argument of the truth of the claims of the expert; the rest of us must accept them as true on different grounds than other experts do.

The literature on the phenomenon of the cognitive authority of science (see Gieryn 1994; Gieryn and Figert 1986) focuses on the mechanisms of social control that scientists employ to preserve and protect their cognitive authority. The cognitive authority of scientists in relation to the public is, so to speak, corporate. Scientists possess their authority when they speak as representatives of science. And the public judgments of science are of science as a corporate phenomenon, of scientists speaking as scientists. So these social control mechanisms are as crucial to the cognitive authority of science, as they are to the professions, Merton’s original subject. But what these literatures have generally ignored is the question that arises in connection with the political concept of authority, the problems of the origin of authority. How did cognitive authorities establish their authority in the first place? And how do they sustain it?

If we consider the paradigm case of physicists as cognitive authorities, the answers to these questions are relatively straightforward, and it is not surprising that the issue is seldom discussed as problematic. We all know (or have testimony that comes from users or recipients) about the eff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Some Basic Theory
• Part II: Aggregation
• Part III: Expert Institutions
• Part IV: Collective Heuristics: Expertise as System
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index