Expertise

Abstract

The main claim of the essay is that expertise is better understood neither as a set of skills that experts possess nor as a social attribution, but as a historically specific way in which we currently talk about the intersection, articulation, and friction between professions, science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the other. It is shown that talk in terms of expertise is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it is claimed that it reflects not the rise of the “expert society,” but its crisis, namely, as long as it was fairly clear who the experts were, and how to recognize them there was little discussion of expertise, but once the number of contenders for expert status has increased and the bases for their claims have become more heterogeneous; once the struggles between these would‐be experts intensified; expertise became problematized because the question was how to determine whose claim is legitimate. After surveying some of the current debates about the nature and character of expertise, the essay concludes by suggesting that the more fruitful approach is to treat expertise in an open‐ended nominalist manner as everything that is necessary to take into account when one seeks to give a description of the capacity to accomplish a relevant task, that is, of everything that is necessary in order for a particular expert statement or performance to be produced, repeated, and disseminated.