Rethinking Expertise

"What does it mean to be an expert? Traditionally, expertise has been associated with authoritative knowledge, honed by practice and certified by powerful institutions. Scientists, of course, are often presumed to be the ultimate experts, but it is exactly in this area that the importance of defining what it means to be an expert is paramount. In Rethinking Expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans offer a radical new perspective on the role of expertise in the practice of science and the public evaluation of technology." "Collins and Evans present the problem of expertise in the context of modern society and go on to offer a Periodic Table of Expertises based on the idea of tacit knowledge - in other words, knowledge that we have but cannot explain. They then explore how some expertises are used to judge others, how we judge between experts even when we are not experts ourselves, and how credentials are used to judge experts. A central new concept in the book and, the authors argue, in society, is interactional expertise - a proficiency in the language of a specialism if not in its practices.