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Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 615–620
Introduction
A new programme of research?
Harry Collins
Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise and Science (KES), Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, CF10 3WT, UK
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
1. Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE)
This special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science represents the work of authors, drawn from a very
wide range of academic backgrounds, whose joint ambition
is to understand expertise. Each contributor has their own
specific project but the papers share a family resemblance
most agreeing that:
1) Expertise is to be treated as real and as more than an
attribution by others.
2) Expertise in a domain can be possessed by those with
experience in the domain even when they are not for-
mally qualified.
3) Technical expertise in esoteric domains is hard to
acquire.
4) It is useful to classify expertise into different types and
levels.
5) The so-called ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’, devel-
oped by Collins and Evans (see Section 5 of this
Introduction), provides at least some useful descrip-
tions of types of expertise.
6) There is an important kind of specialist expertise,
called ‘interactional expertise’ that turns on fluency
in the language of the domain rather than hands-on
experience; it is acquired more through immersion
in the discourse of the hands-on experts than
though participation in their characteristic
practices.
7) High levels of expertise, including interactional exper-
tise, generally involve tacit knowledge acquired
E-mail address: CollinsHM@cf.ac.uk
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Studies in History
and Philosophy
of Science
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through embedding in social groups—sometimes
whole societies, sometimes small specialist groups.
8) An understanding of expertise may allow one to
make prescriptive and normative statements about
the way expertise has been or should be used.
Those contributors with a background in science studies
are also likely to have a considered commitment to the
following:
9) The spheres of the technical and the political must be
separated if normative and prescriptive claims about
the uses of expertise are to be made. Politics may be
intrinsic to science but it should never be extrinsic—
that is, it should never be made an explicit part of a
scientific argument.
10) The very success over the last decades of relativist/
constructivist/symmetrical analyses of scientific
knowledge means that the development of ‘upstream’
normative and prescriptive analysis presents episte-
mological as well as political problems.
11) One solution to the epistemological problems is
to analyse expertise rather than knowledge. The rela-
tivist/constructivist/symmetrical analysis of scientific
and technological knowledge is unaffected by a nor-
mative and prescriptive analysis of expertise.
12) Increased public involvement in technological deci-
sion-making, though necessary, proper and often sci-
entifically useful, can sometimes obscure scientific
and technological issues and give rise to undesirable
outcomes. It is important to try to find ways to recog-
nize when this is happening.
616 H. Collins / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 615–620
The above points could be said to be the core of the pro-
gramme known as Studies of Expertise and Experience,
or SEE.1
2. Interdisciplinarity
As one of the contributors to this volume pointed out,
many of the papers assembled here deal with the melding
of different disciplines or the acquisition of new expertises.
Almost as much as it is about expertise, then, this volume
is about how collaborative work in multi-disciplinary and
interdisciplinary settings is accomplished. Furthermore,
the volume is self-exemplifying, including contributions
from one or more natural scientists, neuroscientists, philos-
ophers, cognitive scientists, ecologists, and sociologists.
Contributors from other disciplinary backgrounds are also
beginning to discuss and research the issues. And, of course,
there is one paper, on trading zones, which takes communi-
cation across academic cultures as its central theme.
In putting together the volume we rediscovered some of
the difficulties and opportunities of interdisciplinary work.
In particular, different referees sometimes considered that
different literatures were germane to the paper they were
reviewing. To write papers that could be guaranteed to sat-
isfy everyone each author would have had to be fully
accomplished in every discipline touched on. The problem
was readily understood by all the referees and contributors,
however, and solutions were speedily invented. One is what
might be called ‘quantum co-authorship’. Referees and
authors were invited to write footnotes (and sometimes
longer sections) for their colleagues to incorporate. These
listed relevant references and ideas from other disciplinary
perspectives. Crucially, they were attributed to the author
of the note rather than the author of the paper that con-
tained them. Another solution was to encourage referees
to work towards publishing their critical commentaries so
that the interplay of the disciplines can be played out in
public. Both of these approaches are in the spirit of ‘eviden-
tial collectivism’, under which the production of knowledge
is seen to be the responsibility of the community rather
than single individuals or groups (evidential individualism).
Evidential collectivism seems to be the best approach for
novel and interdisciplinary enterprises and the notes and
commentaries will be invaluable if SEE is to develop
through the stages of multi-disciplinarity, to full-blown
interdisciplinarity, perhaps eventually becoming a new sub-
ject of study sui generis.2
3. The papers
It is gratifying that the contributors to this volume range
not only across disciplines but also range across the aca-
1
New contributions and other developments in the SEE programme are regularly reported at www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/expertise. For a much more wide
ranging collection of articles on expertise see Selinger & Crease (2006).
2
Once again, see the paper on trading zones.
3
Peter Galison was invited to comment on this paper but was unable to do so; we understand he may be preparing an independent comment.
demic generations from doctoral students to the Project
Director of the $700M Thirty Meter Telescope project.
The volume also includes a comment from one of the most
prominent and influential philosophers of the last fifty
years. The first paper in the volume, authored by Collins
and Sanders, turns on two interviews with scientists who
direct large scale scientific projects. The task involves mak-
ing highly esoteric technical choices in areas in which it is
impossible for the manager to be a full-blown expert
because, however technically competent he or she is, one
cannot be an expert in everything. In this paper the con-
cepts of interactional expertise and referred expertise, taken
from the ‘Periodic Table’ are shown to do work in resolv-
ing the enigma, not only from the point of view of the ana-
lyst, but also from the point of view of the scientists
themselves. Indeed, over the years Sanders has helped with
the development of the ideas and in some respects this
paper is itself a joint refining of the concepts of interac-
tional and referred expertise.
The second paper, by Shrager, is a participant’s account
of the melding of two disciplines. Shrager is an experienced
computer scientist who decided to learn molecular biology
in order to be able to apply his expertise to environmental
problems. He shows how the idea of interactional expertise
helps us to understand how it is that cross-disciplinary com-
munication works between programmers and biologists. He
frames his account in terms of the notion of the ‘trading
zone’ and the paper therefore bears on that by Collins,
Evans and Gorman. Shrager describes a biocomputing plat-
form co-developed by experts drawn from the two groups.
The platform could be said to assemble the multiple perspec-
tives of the collaborating parties. Like any tool, it can be
understood and handled properly only by those who bring
the right expertises to it but its role is so central that it is
tempting to think of it as a participant in the interactions.
The theme of interdisciplinary communication is taken
up in the paper on trading zones by Collins, Evans and
Gorman. Galison first suggested that the metaphor of an
economic trading zone could be used to reduce our puzzle-
ment about how scientists communicated across so-called
‘incommensurable paradigms’ and other discontinuous
areas of discourse. Here we show that, in so far as the idea
of the trading zone is more than a puzzle-avoiding device, it
is at best only a special case of communication across cul-
tures. There are four generic types of communication
across cultural discontinuities depending on the relative
importance of authority, on the one hand, and the eventual
degree of melding of cultures on the other. Interactional
expertise plays a large part in one or more of these
possibilities.3
The meaning of interactional expertise in physics is
taken up by Collins. Collins tries to show via a three-com-
 H. Collins / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 615–620
ponent empirical study that interactional expertise in the
physical sciences can be acquired in the absence of mathe-
matical understanding. This could have implications for
our understanding of the physical sciences, for higher edu-
cation, and for our understanding of the way judgements
are made in the physical sciences, reflecting some of the
themes of the Collins–Sanders paper.
Evans looks at the way econometric models of the econ-
omy are built and used, his account turning on the day-to-
day activities of one of Britain’s most prominent modellers.
This is a particularly interesting case because modelling the
economy is among our most unsuccessful scientific activities
(probably because it is among the most difficult). The study
represents, then, a ‘hard case’ for the justification of the
idea of expertise. Nevertheless, even here we can see how
interactional, contributory and meta-expertises are used
in the development and application of the models and we
can understand why the deployment of these expertises
makes it worthwhile for businessmen to engage with them.
Jenkins develops a detailed case study of the interaction
of expertises belonging to fishers and scientists in their joint
attempts to invent solutions to the problem of ‘bycatch’ in
tuna fishing. Bycatch is the accidental killing of large num-
bers of dolphins in the process of catching tuna. Jenkins
reveals the institutional tensions that developed between
the scientific agencies and the tuna industry and how these
were reflected in the different weight accorded to experience
versus qualification. She shows convincingly that experi-
ence, not qualifications, was the key to solving the prob-
lem. She also shows the importance of the concept of
interactional expertise in the coordination of different
groups working toward a single goal.
Ribeiro looks at the expertises of translators helping
with steel-making technology transfer from Japan to Por-
tuguese-speaking Brazil. The translators are paradigm-
cases of the way interactional expertise is acquired in real
life: the translators must understand the steel-making pro-
cess in order to translate but they cannot themselves make
steel. Not surprisingly, the translators, though not involved
in steel-making, did have considerable ‘physical contiguity’
with the steel-making process. This, however, did not lead
contributory expertise. Ribeiro’s account draws attention
on the question of whether interactional expertise can
really be acquired through immersion in language alone.
The idea of interactional expertise implies that in principle
it can but to prove it empirically is a difficult thing. Inciden-
tally, the beginning of Ribeiro’s paper includes a brief
introduction to the idea of interactional expertise which
may be useful to those who are not familiar with the term.
The debate between Selinger, Dreyfus and Collins is also
about the extent to which bodily involvement in a domain
is necessary for the acquisition of full linguistic fluency in a
domain. Here, however, the driving force of the argument
is philosophical accounts of the role of the body rather
than practice. Selinger argues that Collins’s in-principle
arguments for the ability to acquire interactional expertise
from purely linguistic immersion understates the extent to
617
which even a seemingly ‘pure’ case, like that of Madeleine
as described by Sacks, involves a great deal of bodily
involvement in the world. Collins has to concede that this
is correct but replies that thinking of the body in this philo-
sophical manner distracts attention from the empirical pro-
gramme of working out just how the body is involved and
what happens as bodily involvement is decreased. The
debate with Dreyfus enables the idea of interactional exper-
tise to be adumbrated with still more clarity.
Schilhab’s paper bears on both Ribeiro’s and on the pre-
ceding debate. Schilhab explains that ‘mirror neurons’ can
form a bridge between expertise and experience. When cer-
tain physical actions are merely observed, areas of the
brain that normally activate when the physical action is
done ‘light up’. This opens up the intriguing possibility that
some element of the experience of doing something can be
obtained by merely watching, talking, or thinking about it.
(Athletes may be using mirror neurons when they ‘visual-
ise’ what they are about to do prior to the actual perfor-
mance.) That aside, mirror-neurons could explain why
those trying to acquire interactional expertise try to
observe as much as they can, as with Ribeiro’s interpreters,
and could shed further light on the role of the body. At the
moment these ideas are at the stage of opening up a huge
and inviting terrain for further research—for example, to
what extent does the loss of various physical capacities
affect the activity of mirror neurons and is it possible to
acquire interactional expertise when mirror neurons are
not involved? As Schilhab points out, it would be wrong
to jump to the conclusion that the existence of mirror neu-
rons entirely resolves the tension between interactional
expertise and physical involvement. We should hold on
to the ‘bold conjecture’ that interactional expertise can be
acquired in the absence of any physical counterpart for
as long as possible: only this way will be forced to explore
all the research questions in a sufficiently determined way.
Weinel’s paper is an analysis of South African President
Thabo Mbeki’s decision not to pay for the distribution of
an antiretroviral drug (AZT) to mothers suffering from
HIV. We now believe that this decision led to thousands
of newborns unnecessarily contracting HIV. The question
is whether SEE could have put us in a position to show that
Mbeki’s decision was wrong even though at the time he was
able to cite the work of a body of maverick scientists who
claimed that AZT was a poison with no beneficial effects.
Weinel argues that since Mbeki had no more than ‘Primary
Source Knowledge’—another category taken from the
Periodic Table—he was not in a position to make such a
decision and he should have left it to the scientific commu-
nity. This argument could have been made ‘upstream’ and
formed a basis for insisting that the right policy was to dis-
tribute AZT.
4. SEE and social studies of science
SEE, then, reaches out in many directions, some of
which were totally unanticipated at the outset. On the
618 H. Collins / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 615–620
one hand SEE leads to the asking of new questions about
the functioning of the brain, on the other it may be able
to answer questions about why we should trust economists;
on the one hand SEE promises to shed new light on age old
philosophical questions about the meaning of the body, on
the other hand it sheds new light on the management of sci-
ence. Without repeating the entire contents list, we can see
that each paper represents a point on a solid ‘star’ repre-
senting new directions for inquiry. Looking at the methods
we find an equally wide range of approaches: SEE can be
investigated philosophically, via sociological and ethno-
graphic fieldwork, via the methods of psychology, and even
with new kinds of experiment, but all fit together because
they reach toward the common goal of understanding
expertise and experience. Given this exciting diversity, I
hope I can be forgiven for finishing by discussing one
potential consequence for my own disciplinary area—social
studies of science—since it reflects the concern that led to
the start of the programme.
Consideration of the case of AZT in South Africa opens
up the whole relationship between SEE, science studies,
and the role of the public in technological decision-making.
In the case of AZT and South Africa, a traditional symmet-
rical analysis of scientific knowledge would have nothing
prescriptive to say about the choices made. We need to find
a way to be more proactive.
The resolution currently offered by many social analysts
is to argue that the public should have a greater impact on
technological decision-making. One warrant for this view-
point is the inextricability of the political and the technical.
It follows that technical disagreements should always be
exposed to make sure that the role of the public is not
swamped by scientific authority—‘transparency’ is the
key idea.4 On the face of it, it is as hard to argue against
a demand for less secrecy, more transparency, and more
public participation in decision making as it is to argue
against motherhood and apple pie. But more transparency
is not always a good thing. Transparency in respect of a
supposed scientific disagreement can provide a dust cloud
behind which politicians hide their interventions. It appears
that Thabo Mbeki used the ‘disagreement’ between scien-
tists to legitimate his essentially political decisions about
how money should be spent in South Africa. Had the
judgement about the balance between the maverick view
and the mainstream view been made by someone who
understood the processes of science better, then it would
have been clear that Mbeki’s decisions were essentially
political and that there was no scientific warrant for them.
Transparency in respect of scientific disagreement can some-
times lead to opacity in respect of political choice! Weinel’s
analysis, if it is correct, shows that it is sometimes appro-
priate for the social scientist to do ‘asymmetrical’ analysis
upstream, transmuting social scientific expertise into a sci-
4
For example, see Stilgoe, Irwin, & Jones (2006).
5
I do not say that the social scientists were causally responsible for this death and suffering, I merely point out where these arguments stand in
relationship to the death and suffering.
entific judgement. Waiting for the ‘scientific dust to settle’
may sometimes only reveal the tragedy that was unfolding
beneath it.
And ‘South Africa’ is not so far away. In Britain at least
a few children died and a few were maimed because of the
failure of some parents to protect their children against
measles in the aftermath of the MMR controversy (which
led to parents refusing to accept the combined vaccination
against mumps, measles and rubella). Social scientists
argued, quite rightly, that some of the blame was to be laid
at the door of the authorities because the clumsy way they
handled the crisis encouraged distrust among the parents.
But some confounded the issue by allowing themselves to
be read as justifying the actions of the parents, not just
exploring and explaining them. This is to obscure the social
scientists’ role. For social scientists to act in accordance
with their own principle of transparency they would have
to declare one of two things: ‘on the basis of the scientific
evidence available at the time, the parents were wrong to
act as they did even though we can understand their
actions’; ‘empirically unsupported remarks by a doctor at
a press conference are enough to vitiate a supposed scien-
tific consensus—in this case the consensus on the question
of whether MMR vaccine could cause autism’.
The social sciences cannot always avoid the responsibil-
ity that comes with the analysis of knowledge. In urgent
cases such as AZT, and MMR discharging this responsibil-
ity requires that a scientific judgement be made before the
dust of disagreement has settled because to make no judge-
ment is to make a judgement by default—‘the scientific bal-
ance is so unsettled that the way is clear for politicians to
make whatever political choices they want to make’. In
so far as we now know anything, we now know that in
the cases of both AZT and MMR the consequence of the
default position was unnecessary death and suffering.5
If social scientists, as social scientists, are to discharge
the responsibility of making occasional upstream judge-
ments about science and technology, they need social scien-
tific tools to do their job—that seems unarguable. SEE may
be one such tool.
5. The Periodic Table of Expertises
Robert Crease suggested that since it is referred to a
number of times throughout the volume it would be helpful
to reproduce and explain the ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’
here. The description below is the short introduction to the
table reproduced from the beginning of Chapter 1 of Col-
lins and Evans’s Rethinking expertise (University of Chi-
cago Press, 2007). A more complete exposition can be
found in the rest of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of that book.
The table (Table 1) is shown in two dimensions but some
features, such as the polimorphic/mimeomorphic distinc-
 H. Collins / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 615–620
Table 1
The periodic table of expertises (from Collins & Evans, 2007, p. 14; used with the permission of University of Chicago Press)
UBIQUITOUS EXPERTISES
DISPOSITIO
NS
SPECIALIST UBIQUITOUS
TACIT KNOWLEDGE
Beer-mat Popular Primary
EXPERTISES Knowledge Understanding Source
Knowledge
META- EXTERNAL
(Transmuted expertises) (Non-transmuted expertises)
Ubiquitous Local Technical
EXPERTISES Discrimination Discrimination Connoisseurship Discrimination Expertise
META-
Credentials
CRITERIA
tion might be better represented in a third dimension—a
column emerging from the page in the case of some sub-
divisions. The same could be done with something like
the Dreyfus and Dreyfus five-stage model of learning a
contributory expertise. Working from the top of the table,
ubiquitous expertises are those, such as natural language
speaking, which every member of a society must possess
in order to live in it; when one has a ubiquitous expertise
one has, by definition, a huge body of tacit knowledge—
things you just know how to do without being able to
explain the rules for how you do them. This row of the
table also includes all those expertises one needs to make
political judgments. Below this line the table is exclusively
concerned with technical expertises—those that have sci-
ence and technology content.
Dispositions are not very important to the conceptual
structure of the table; they are personal qualities—the ones
we discuss are linguistic fluency and analytic flair.
The next row deals with the specialist expertises. Low
levels of specialist expertise are better described as levels
of knowledge—like knowledge of the kind of facts needed
to succeed in general knowledge quizzes. One may be able
to recite a lot of such fact-like things without being able to
do anything much as a result except succeed in quizzes.
Three low levels of expertise are listed on the left hand side
of the specialist expertise rows of the table. It is important
619
Interactive Ability
Reflective Ability
SPECIALIST
TACIT KNOWLEDGE
Interactional Contributory
Expertise Expertise
Polimorphic
Mimeomorphic
INTERNAL
Downward Referred
Experience Track-Record
to note that acquiring low levels of expertise seems like a
trivial accomplishment only to those who already possess
ubiquitous expertise; acquisition of even these low levels
rests on the prior acquisition of a vast, but generally unno-
ticed, foundation of ubiquitous expertise.
To acquire higher levels of specialist expertise more than
ubiquitous expertise is needed. To go further along row
three it is necessary to immerse oneself in a domain so as
to acquire ‘specialist tacit knowledge’, not just learn more
facts or fact-like relationships. Two categories of higher
level expertise are found at the right hand end of the spe-
cialist expertise rows. The highest level is ‘contributory
expertise’, which is what you need to do an activity with
competence. Just below this, however, is ‘interactional
expertise’, which is the ability to master the language of a
specialist domain in the absence of practical competence.
The idea of interactional expertise is immanent in many
roles, from peer reviewer to high level journalist, not to
mention sociologist or anthropologist, but it seems not to
have been discussed before in an explicit way. A good pro-
portion of the book is taken up with explaining the notion
of interactional expertise because it is a new concept.
Moving down to the fourth row we encounter meta-
expertises. The first set of two meta-expertises are the pre-
rogative of judges who, not possessing the expertise in
question, make judgments about experts who do possess
620 H. Collins / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 615–620
it. This is done by judging the experts’ demeanour, the
internal consistency of their remarks, the appropriateness
of their social locations, and so forth. These are ‘trans-
muted expertises’ because they use social discrimination
to produce technical discrimination. The first kind of dis-
crimination depends on the kind of ubiquitous expertise
one gains in a democratic society as one learns to choose
between politicians, salespersons, service providers, and
so forth. The second kind of discrimination depends on
local knowledge about those around you. The second set
of three meta-expertises do not depend on transmutation
as they are based on possessing one level or another of
the expertise being judged. ‘Technical connoisseurship’ is
like the expertise of art critics or wine buffs who, crucially,
are not themselves artists or wine-makers. The middle of
the three categories relates to what we most naturally think
of as skilful judgment—where one specialist judges
another. There are three directions in which this middle
category of judgment can be made: an expert can judge
someone who is still more expert, an expert can judge
someone equally expert, or an expert can judge someone
less expert. Mostly experts think they are pretty good at
judging in any of the three directions but we argue that
only the downward direction is reliable, the other direc-
tions tending to lead to wrong impressions of reliability
or irresolvable dispute. The one reliable category which
appears in the table is, therefore, labelled ‘downward dis-
crimination’. Referred expertise is the use of an expertise
learned in one domain within another domain. In the chap-
ter we use examples drawn from the management of large
scientific projects, where a manager moves from one to
another, to illustrate the concept.
The final row of the table refers to the criteria that out-
siders try to use to judge between experts to avoid having
to make the more difficult kind of judgments described
above. They can check expert’s qualifications, they can
check expert’s track records of success, or, as what we
argue is the best method of the criterion-based judgment,
they can assess the expert’s experience.
Acknowledgements
This special issue owes its genesis to University of Chi-
cago Press, who supported the overall project by publish-
6
I was the one person who knew who was refereeing my contributions but this seemed to result only in my receiving the most robust criticisms of all.
ing Collins and Evans’s Rethinking expertise in 2007, and
to Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, editors of this
journal, who courageously published our first experimental
paper in 2006 and immediately saw the potential of the spe-
cial issue. The major debt, of course, is owed to the
authors, especially for their patience in the face of my
intrusive editorial interventions.
All the papers in the volume were anonymously refereed
by one or more external assessors and by one or more of
the authors, a subset of whom read each others’ papers;
the later process was also carried out anonymously.6 It
turned out that while both external and ‘internal’ referees
made many critical but constructive comments, each over-
all judgement on every paper was sufficiently positive to al-
low the relaxation of anonymity post hoc. This enables me
to thank Robert Crease, Head of Philosophy at Stoney-
brook, for doing the bulk of the external refereeing work,
and Trevor Pinch and Peter Halligan for their work on spe-
cific papers.
Three of the papers in this volume—those by Collins,
Evans & Gorman, Jenkins, and Shrager—drew their first
breaths at a workshop organised by Mike Gorman: ‘Trad-
ing zones: Interactional expertise and interdisciplinary col-
laboration’, supported by the US National Science
Foundation (SES-0526096), the Boston Consulting Group,
and the Center for Nanotechnology & Society at Arizona
State University. Without Mike and his sponsors there
may well have been no special issue. University of Chicago
Press is also to be thanked for allowing us to reprint the
above section on the Periodic Table from Rethinking exper-
tise. Finally, I am especially grateful to Cardiff University
and its School of Social Sciences for giving me and the
other Cardiff-based authors, time, space, and a modicum
of financial help, to pursue the work, and to my colleagues
in KES for being a brilliant and enthusiastic discussion
group.
References
Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking expertise. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Selinger, E., & Crease, R. (Eds.). (2006). The philosophy of expertise. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Stilgoe, J., Irwin, A., & Jones, K. (2006). The received wisdom: Opening up
expert advice. London: Demos.