On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom

Abstract

In On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom, Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher lays out an ambitious agenda to chart how different types of experts— professional researchers and citizen scientists—think about expertise. The book relies primarily on an online survey of over 90 participants and interviews with some 40 experts to elicit self-descriptions of how respondents acquired their expertise and how these experts assess the expertise of others. It should be obvious that I am no expert in rhetoric. As a sociologist asked to review a book about expertise from rhetorical studies, I have had to rely on a form of ‘‘referred expertise’’ or when ‘‘skills that have been learned in one scientific area are indirectly applied to another’’ (Collins and Sanders 2007:622). Yet such cross-field engagement is often fruitful as it exposes us to new ideas and helps us clarify the assumptions that we hold when thinking about expertise. Mehlenbacher’s rhetorical approach to expertise certainly has affinities to sociology. As Mehlenbacher writes, ‘‘rhetoric offers a complex theoretical framework that allows for contingencies, tensions, characters and credibility, socialization and socio-cognitive apprenticing, tensions between stabilization and change, and cognitive wetware in a formulation of expertise’’ (p. 20). This resonates with Goffmanian approaches to expertise that have examined the audiences, scripts, and frontstage/backstage performances of scientific expertise (Hilgartner 2000). The description of expertise in the book also accords with the distinction between experts and expertise in the sociology of expertise, which places experts within broader expertise networks that are often fraught with instability, conflict, and change (Eyal 2013). A sociology of expertise that incorporates some of the insights of rhetorical studies should pay attention to how performances of expertise are situationally dependent and include tried and true repertoires but also improvisation and novel scripts. The book is divided into five substantive chapters in addition to an Introduction and Conclusion. Chapters One, Two, and Three engage in theory-building by reviewing the literature in rhetorical studies, psychology, and sociology, as well as virtue ethics. These chapters also occasionally draw from the interviews to discuss how experts honed their knowledge and skills. Chapter Four draws more heavily on the empirical material, looking at how professional researchers engage in interdisciplinary work by evaluating the expertise of others. Chapter Five looks at how citizen scientists build credibility as quasi-outsiders from more credentialed and institutionalized forms of expertise. In the first set of chapters, Mehlenbacher elaborates on the concept of phronesis or practical wisdom and good judgment, which draws on Aristotelian ethics. Phronesis, for Mehlenbacher, matters because expertise ‘‘is not simply a matter of acquiring some knowledge and practicing some skill, but crucially, of applying knowledge and skill to some problem, some situation, and doing so with good intention’’ (p. 17). Furthermore, phronesis is about trust, as ‘‘expertise, too, requires moral knowledge to functionally operate because expertise is embedded within a community of practice where the values and norms of the community shape practice’’ (p. 34). For instance, performances of expertise that seem to engender trust in professional settings could include the display of ‘‘respect’’ and ‘‘epistemic humility’’ (p. 58), which allow experts to foster goodwill from others. Expertise that is trustworthy, under this formulation, thus depends on performances and ways of Reviews 465