| In this dissertation I argue that it is important to determine the nature and scope of expertise. I claim that prevailing accounts tend to make untenable claims about lay judgment, while explaining expertise in terms of a single overarching factor: embodiment, discretionary power, social recognition, dogma, or ideology. I demonstrate that all these accounts fail to recognize, or are insensitive to, interrelations among and between these and other factors. I further insist that a proper conception of expertise should provide a basis from which to reevaluate the methods that have been used to interpret it: phenomenology, critical theory, social epistemology, actor network theory, and social constructivism. In drawing from different branches of philosophy and sociology, I show that while disciplinary boundaries make an understanding of expertise possible, they also impede investigation by devaluing scholarship that expands or crosses these boundaries.; The conclusions I draw would have been difficult to reach had I come to this area of study with the preconception that the thinkers under review necessarily examine expertise in overly reductive terms. A dialectic of reading was required in which a range of figures---Harry Collins, Hubert Dreyfus, Paul Feyerabend, Steve Fuller, John Hardwig, Bruno Latour, Herbert Marcuse, David Noble, and Andrew Pickering---was compared. By juxtaposing opposing approaches, and by evaluating different justifications for presenting particular examples of expert activity as paradigmatic, I render explicit the aspects of expertise that theorists conceal in attempting broad explanations. I am thus able to show how sensible thinkers may nonetheless construct radically opposed and contradictory descriptive and normative claims about the relation between authority, knowledge, skill, and experience. I also explain how investigators from different traditions can collectively be prone to overlooking insights that others take as fundamental. By appropriating the primary insights found in each theorist's approach, while avoiding their excesses, I finally carve out the space for a more adequate treatment of expertise in general. I conclude on a practical note by applying my research to the debates surrounding distance learning. |
