Robert Evans
Cardiff School of Social Sciences
Imitation Game gets "Slated"
Harry Collins and Rob Evans's Expertise website received nearly one thousand hits last week. The reason: an article about our imitation game research published in Slate, an online news magazine owned by the Washington Post.
The article picks up the same themes mentioned in the Nature article about the same research, namely that Harry Collins was able to pass as a gravitational wave physicist in version of the Imitation Game. The claim made, therefore, is that Collins, as a result of his sociological research has developed interactional expertise in this area of physics.
The interesting question is what conclusion you draw from this. It certainly doesn’t suggest that anyone can understand anything or that lay people are automatically as qualified as scientists to make decisions of scientific questions. What it does suggest, however, is that restricting participation to disciplinary specialists alone excludes those who lack formal qualifications but nonetheless have substantial expertise.
Identifying these other experts and investigating the contributions they might make to different questions is the empirical programme at the heart of the expertise project.
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Last updated on 7 October, 2006