Robert Evans
Cardiff School of Social Sciences
Rethinking Expertise: Reviews and Features
Rethinking
Expertise brings together many of the different ideas about expertise
that have been developed within the SEE programme. The book contains a detailed
exposition of the Periodic Table of Expertises, plus chapers exploring how
the idea of interactional expertise relates to philosophical debates about
embodiment, how the imitation game can be used to investigate expertise and
the implications of our work for recognising and using science in society.
This page brings together reviews and features based on the book and some of our other related work. So far there has been a review published in Nature and a two page feature article on the same work also appearing in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
The Nature review was written by Robert Crease, Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and, if you have access rights, can be downloaded in full from http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/450350b. The review provides a good summary of the main issues covered in the book and also includes some nice compliments, like this one:
"Collins and Evans put their points vividly, with elegant language and diagrams"
The THES article was written by Matthew Reisz and the full text is available to THES subscribers from http://www.thes.co.uk/story.aspx?story_id=2039468. The article summarises the Cardiff research programme, including Rethinking Expertise, which is described as follows:
“The book offers a rich and detailed "periodic table" of expertise, ranging from the kind of beer-mat knowledge useful only in pub quizzes to the levels of skill that enable people to make a contribution to cutting-edge science. It considers wine buffs and art connoisseurs, hoaxers, journalists and pseudoscientists. It looks at deep philosophical issues of "embodiment" - whether you need to move around in the world to acquire a language or the jargon of a specialist field - that have major implications for the study of artificial intelligence and computer learning. It is full of case studies, anecdotes and intriguing experiments. But at its heart are questions arising directly out of the authors' work in the sociology of science and the challenges of scientifically literate public decision- making.”
Rethinking
Expertise is published by The
University of Chicago Press and is now available from online booksellers
such as amazon.co.uk.
References
If you are unable to access the electronic versions of the articles listed above, the complete references are:
Robert P. Crease (2007) ‘Human Distilleries’, Nature 450 (15 November 2007), 350 - 351.
Matthew Reisz (2007) ‘Expert Opinions’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 7 December 2007, pp. 18-10
Last updated on 14 December, 2007