Abstract
I reply to my critics in respect of my work on expertise. I define the 'core' of the multidisciplinary 'expertise studies'. I argue that those who have taken the work seriously could resolve their problems by paying more attention to the core. Each could have made good use of an aspect of the core.
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Notes
This is not to say that focussing on boundary problems is never important. On the contrary, over the last decades, a huge amount of useful analytic and political work has been done by pointing to the permeability and indistinctness of the boundaries around certain categories such as race and gender. Much scientific activity, however, requires one to ‘cope with’ boundary problems not highlight them. This is the case even where race and gender are involved. For example, if one is interested in the changing relationship of women’s and men’s voting patterns in some society, then one has to categorise women and men in spite of the boundary problems.
The notion of ‘bee-language’, in contrast, is not a matter of boundaries, it is just a mistake—bees exchange information which is quite a different matter.
Wittgenstein, it is true, does not deal with meaning change in science or anywhere else; Collins 1985/92 is a self-conscious attempt to deal with the implicit conservatism of the Wittgensteinian approach, and that is why it is entitled ‘Changing Order’.
Here, both Addis and I have accepted what Winch (1958) called an ‘underlabourer’ role. That is, we are both, as we suppose, using philosophical arguments to be prescriptive about a science.
Thus, I consider Dreyfus’s ‘Five Stage’ Model misses the enormously important distinction between the ‘somatic tacit knowledge’ needed to become skilful at changing gears in a car and the ‘collective tacit knowledge’ needed to drive in traffic in different countries; that is why you can have an automatic gearbox, but you cannot have an automatic driver without changing the whole car driving system. Polanyi makes the same mistake in respect of bicycle riding.
Dreyfus made this clear, if it wasn’t already, during an interchange at the joint psychology/SEESHOP4 workshop in Berkeley in 2010.
The term ‘connoisseur’ has been defined in two different ways in the existing SEE literature: (a) an interactional expert and (b) an expert in consuming not making. Ribeiro is right to point out that the concept has not yet been satisfactorily worked out.
For a recent reiteration of the point in an explicit way, see Collins (2012).
See, for example, Collins et al. (2006). (Ribeiro helped with the experiments and is co-author.)
Clearly set out in Collins (2012).
By the way, I do not know what is gained by implying or denying (in this issue) that learning a natural language, which is a matter of socialisation, is to ‘subliminally stockpile bits of implicit knowledge … [and] … somehow make tacit knowledge explicit’. Socialisation could be described in these terms so long as they are not given a negative valuation and so long as the term ‘knowledge’ is defined in a useful way rather than as analytic philosophers might define it but making all tacit knowledge explicit is no part of my concept of learning a language – quite the contrary, my concept says that learning a language is largely a matter of acquiring tacit knowledge.
My interpretation of Wittgenstein is, of course, shared by philosophers such as Bloor and Kusch.
The methodology I use in the work on gravitational wave physics will be discussed at length in a forthcoming book (University of Chicago Press), with the title ‘Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog: Scientific Discovery and Social Analysis in the Twenty-First Century’.
My objection is exactly the same as that I made to Selinger’s not dissimilar proposal (Selinger et al 2007).
References
Collins, H. (1985). Changing order: replication and induction in scientific practice (2nd ed.). Beverly Hills: Sage. 2nd edition 1992, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, H. (2010). Tacit and explicit knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, H. (2011). Language and practice. Social Studies of Science, 41(2), 271–300.
Collins, H. (2012). Language as a repository of tacit knowledge. In T. Schilhab, F. Stjernfelt, & T. Deacon (Eds.), The symbolic species evolved (pp. 235–239). Dordrecht: Springer.
Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, H. M., Evans, R., Ribeiro, R., & Hall, M. (2006). Experiments with interactional expertise. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 37(A/4), 656–674.
Sacks, O. (1985). (The man) who mistook his wife for a hat. London: Duckworth.
Selinger, E., Dreyfus, H., and Collins, H. (2007). Embodiment and interactional expertise. In H. M. Collins (Ed.), Case studies of expertise and experience. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 38(4), 722–740 (Special issue)
Winch, P. (1958). The idea of a social science. London: Routledge.
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Collins, H. The core of expertise. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 399–416 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9277-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9277-8