Experts and Consensus (Bayreuth, 25-26 May 2012)

Another week, another conference! It will be the last foreign trip for a while, but was a good one to finish with.

The conference was a small workshop organised by Carlo Martini on the topic of Experts and Consensus in the Social Sciences. The meeting was held at Beyreuth University and consisted of 12 papers from a mixture or philosophers, sociologists and economists in which both the costs and benefits of consensus and different ways of reaching it were explored. The common themes that emerged across the presentations were the importance of institutions in hosting expert interactions, the value of pluralism and hence of not reaching consensus and the difficulty of devising procedural rules for combining different judgements from what appear to be ‘epistemic peers’.

The full programme, with abstracts, is available on-line. For what it is worth, the presentations that related most directly to my own interests and thus prompted me to re-consider my own views were as follows:

• Maria Jiminez Buedo [] spoke about the difficulty of recognising legitimate expertise in times of controversy and began with the example of Alessio Rastani, who was interviewed by the BBC and prompted a barrage of complaint and speculation about whether he was a real expert or not. The interview is here: watch it and make your own mind up! The BBC news article about the controversy is here. The more general issue is, of course, even if you accept a realist theory of expertise, the problem of how to recognise these experts is only raised, not resolved.
• Merel Lefevere presented a paper that responded to Heather Douglas’s claim that scientists (and presumably other experts) have a moral duty to contextualise their advice by making reference to limits and problems that can be reasonably foreseen. The difficulty is figuring out what can be reasonably foreseen and Lefevere and her co-author (Eric Schliesser) argued that a more pluralistic approach to expertise, particularly by those responsible for aggregating expert opinion or advice, was needed. I must confess that I think the argument just shifts the problem from defining what can be ‘reasonably’ foreseen to what counts as ‘reasonable’ pluralism (i.e. it doesn’t solve the Problem of Extension) though I am sympathetic to the general idea that advice should reflect the diversity of views available within the relevant expert community.
• Frank den Butter who I first met 15 years ago at the 10th Anniversary Congress of the TinbergenInstitute, presented a paper that drew on his experiences of working with policy-makers in the Netherlands. The paper stressed the need for ‘compromise,’ rather than ‘consensus,’ and argued that this was a critical factor in reaching agreement about policy options. He illustrated the argument with examples of four consultation exercises based on ‘matching zones’ stakeholders and argued that seeing these events as a ‘game of trust’ – in which repeated face-to-face contact plays an important role – was crucial to their eventual success. In many ways, the these stakeholder exercises could be seen as ways of institutionalising the ‘political phase’ of a technological decision-making in the public domain.
• Carlo Martini focused on the technical phase, rather than the political phase in a talk that compared the way expert groups were selected based on the nature of the task they had been set. In doing so he emphasised a theme that emerged several times over the two days, namely the importance of institutional design to the problem of expertise. In this case, the two contrasting examples were the Bank of England’s MonetaryPolicy Committee and the US Boskin Commission on CPI.
•  Laszlo Kosolosky also raised issues that relate to the distinction between the technical and political phases. In arguing that consensus might be over-rated, in the sense that disagreements and their rationales might also be important, he distinguished between an academic consensus and an interface consensus. This struck me as particularly interesting as it provided a way of clarifying something about the SEE approach to expertise, namely that there is an expert community (scientific or otherwise) in a particular domain that might have reached a consensus about some topic. In Kosolosky’s terms this would be an academic consensus, though in old-fashioned SSK we might call this a core-group. In contrast, the interface consensus relates to the collective views of a diverse group of experts, each perhaps representing different core-groups who act as advisers (i.e. at the interface between between expert groups and policy-making). As such pluralistic groups are less likely to reach consensus, especially if the concept it taken to imply a greater degree of buy-in than simple agreement, then Kosolosky argues that what is important is not so much the outcome (consensus or not) but an agreement on the procedures to be followed when managing interactions at the interface. In other words, it is the institutional arrangements that are crucial rather than the achievement of consensus itself.

Of course, this is not to say that the other presentations were not interesting. They were but the ones listed above are the ones that raised questions that relate directly to the Studies in Expertise and Experience perspective.

RCN Network Meeting, Boston

On Friday 18 and Sat 19 May, I was in Boston for the first meeting of the Research Co-ordination Network on Sustainable Energy Systems, which funded by NSF and led by Tom Seager. The RCN includes a series of internships for sustainability students in settings outside their home discipline and will use a version of the Imitation Game method in order to explore the extent to which being immersed in a different culture, if only for a few month, allows students to develop meaningful levels of interactional expertise.

Martin Weinel and I were there in order to report on the latest developments at Cardiff and to find out more about what the RCN version of the Imitation Game will look like. This was the main focus of the Friday, where we met the other participants in the Network and described our research interests to each other. In relation to the Imitation Game, we learnt that there are a couple of significant innovations being developed by the RCN, namely that:

1. The RCN version of the Imitation Game will use a Judge plus three other participants: a contributory expert from the target domain (a ‘positive’ control), a student or similar with no immersion in the target domain (a ‘negative’ control) and the student who has had the internship. The hypothesis is that, at the end of the internship, the judge should be able to order the participants and locate the intern’s level on expertise as being between that of the other two participants.
2. The numbers will be relatively small, so statistical analysis of the kind we are doing at IMGAME will be inappropriate. Instead, the success of the internship program will be measured for the individual students in their performance in the Imitation Game. In addition, by aggregating the individual results, the proportion of interns who achieve this intermediate level of interactional expertise can be calculated, giving a measure of success for the programme as a whole.

The official RCN meeting on Friday was then followed on Sat 19 May by a workshop in which Tom Seager, Evan Selinger and others described how they are using role-play games to teach ethics in relation tosustainability. This is of particular interest to Imitation Game project as, like us, they are taking role play games that could (and have?) been played in more traditional pencil-and-paper ways, and turning them into electronic formats that can be adapted for a wide range of classroom contexts. The whole set up was very impressive and provided plenty of food for thought about how we might develop the Imitation Game and (in my other life) how we might teach research methods differently.

4S Annual Meeting, Cleveland

Now back in Cardiff after attending the 4S Annual Meeting in Cleveland. As the conference was co-located with the History of Science and Society (HSS) and the Society for History of Technology (SHOT), plenary sessions were especially abundant this year – one for almost every day of the conference in fact.

As might be expected given events in Japan, sessions about the nuclear industry in general, and Fukushma in particular, had a high profile this year. In contrast, biosciences and public participation felt less numerous to me although the official programme suggests there were lots of them too! My own paper – about Democracy and the ‘Third Wave’ – was part of the Science, Technology and Public Policy theme, which included over 120 separate sessions.

The conference was very enjoyable and presentations in the sessions I went to were all of a consistently high standard. Navigating through the conference program the size of 4S is inevitably somewhat arbitrary but I did enjoy several papers, hear the phrase ‘interactional expertise’ being used as if it were a standard explanatory term on at least one occasion, and find a couple of people to invite to the next SEESHOP.

Overall, therefore, I think it was a successful couple of days.

Linking STS and the Social Sciences, Korea

This conference was organised by Center for Social Sciences (CSS) at Seoul National University and the Korean Association of Science and Technology Studies (KASTS). I’m especially grateful to out hosts Prof. Myung-Seok Oh and Byeong-Cheol Mun for the invitation and the kindness they showed in looking after us so well and making my visit to Korea so enjoyable.

The conference was spread over two days (see programme) and included papers addressing theoretical issues in STS and their application to technoscientific risks. Theoretically, the conference was dominated by actor-network theory, which seems to be the dominant approach in Korea (as evidenced by the framing of the conference which reflected Latour’s view of the ‘the social’ as an outcome. I like to think that those of us who don’t subscribe to this view persuaded those present that there was at least some life left in the ‘social’ as an analytic category.

It was also interesting to see the extent to which there was a specifically Korean version of either science or STS. As the previous paragraph intimates, I don’t think there is a specifically Korean STS, unless by this we mean it is unusually persuaded by ANT but I am not sure it is unusual even in this sense. I also didn’t get much sense that there is a specifically Korean science in the sense that, for example, Arie Rip refers to Maori science. Korean science is basically Western Science as far as I could tell.

What is different, and is (I think) distinctively Korean, however, is science policy. The transformation of Korean society since WWII is quite mind-boggling to see and, as several of the talks from Korean scholars made clear, is no accident. Instead it is a deliberate result of adopting a science and technology policy that attempts to leapfrog the ‘appropriate technology’ logic of development by going straight for the high-end advanced technologies that Western countries want, use and develop. This is most apparent in the automobile and consumer electronics industries but, as the Hwang Woo-Suk scandal made clear, also includes considerable investment in biosciences too. Whether other countries can follow this model as well I don’t know but our brief visit to Seoul showed that it has certainly worked for the Koreans.