Experts in Science and Society

308 Pages·2004·4.791 MB·English

by  Horst Rakel (auth.), Elke Kurz-Milcke, Gerd Gigerenzer (eds.)

Experts in Science
and Society
Experts in Science
and Society
Edited by
Elke Kurz-Milcke
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia
Gerd Gigerenzer
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Berlin, Germany
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Preface
For none of those systems of thought without which we cannot do if we want
to conceive of those parts of reality which are significant in each case, can
possibly exhaust the infinite richness of reality. None is anything else than an
attempt (…) to bring order into the chaos of those facts, which in each case
we have included within the sphere of our interest.
Max Weber1
Experts are called in when there is something at stake for an individual, a group,
or society at large. This volume represents a multi-authored endeavor towards a
nuanced understanding of the expert in modern societies. The initial impetus for
bringing together the contributors to this volume came from an invitational
meeting by the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. This meet-
ing, a Schloessmann Seminar, gathered a group of young scientists and established
scholars to discuss research and research proposals pertinent to the phenomenon
of The Expert in Modern Societies, Past and Present. The specific opportunity af-
forded by this seminar and, subsequently, this volume has been inclusiveness as
regards scientific disciplines and research domains. This volume is about experts
and by the same token about science, cultures, political systems, representational
practices, public debate, organizations, institutions, law, ethics, modernity, risk,
environmental protection, and, last but not least, about expertise.
Expertise easily appears to be a personal attribute. After all, who would want
to argue with the verity that experts have expertise, and are called in for their ex-
pertise? Semantics notwithstanding, the chapters in this volume demonstrate
that it would be ill-advised to consider expertise merely a personal attribute, no
matter how skilled, knowledgeable, and educated a person may be. Nevertheless,
this volume is focused on experts and in many ways on people. We think that this
choice has served the project well for advancing our understanding of expertise.
A human-centered perspective on expertise brings home the actualities of experts
living in particular societies, participating in particular organizations and institu-
tions, engaging in particular practices, and thus partaking in particular cultures.
We recognize that in many areas of society, especially in those related to
training and education, the issue arises of how to best foster well-versed exper-
tise. The answer is in engaging students, and we think the same must be assumed
for the study of expertise. The chapters in this volume engage with the particu-
larities of the historical cases that the authors have chosen. The sociologist and
occasional methodologist of the cultural and social sciences Max Weber realized
1 1921, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (p. 207) [Collected Essays in the Logic
of Science], Tübingen, Germany: Mohr. Cited in an English translation by Thomas Burger, 1976,
MaxWeber’s theory of concept formation: History, laws, and ideal types, Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press.
v
vi Preface
that such engagement does not need to run counter to characterizations in terms
of more general categories that serve understanding beyond the particulars of a
case. In fact, Weber thought that the social scientist’s engagement with historical
events and relationships could not but be coupled with emphasis on such cate-
gories. In Weber’s position we sense a call for boldness and reasonableness when
it comes to our engagement with particular cases of expertise, past and present.
We can boldly assume that with the analyses of particular cases, we bespeak
largerissues related to expertise in modern societies, and reasonably do so to the
extent that we are careful in our analyses.
The preparation of this volume was generouslysupported by the Max Planck
Society for the Advancement of Science, who provided the means to gather the
authors at a three-day Schloessmann Seminar and funded the editorial work on
this volume. We thank the members of the participating Max Planck Institutes
(MPI), in particular, Hans-Jörg Albrecht (MPI for Foreign and International
Criminal Law), Jürgen Baumert (MPI for Human Development), Lorraine
Daston and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPI for the History of Science), Renate
Mayntz (MPI for the Study of Societies), Hartmut Lehmann and Manfred
Jakubowski-Tiessen (MPI for History), Gerhard Schricker (MPI for Intellectual
Property, Competition and Tax Law), Manfred E. Streit (MPI for Research into
Economic Systems), and James W. Vaupel (MPI for Demographic Research). We
also wish to thank Jean-Paul Brodeur, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Willem Wage-
naar for their participation in the Seminar and their commentaries on various
contributions during the workshop. As editors, we are grateful to a number of
scholars for their willingness to serve as reviewers for the contributions in this
volume, among them Valerie Chase, Salvatore Ciriacono, Peter Imhof, Lothar
Krappmann, Stephanie Kurzenhäuser, Gero Lenhardt, Renate Mayntz, François
Mélard, Theodore Porter, Frank Stahnisch, Heike Trappe, and RyanTweney. We
were greatly supported in the editorial work by AnitaTodd and Christel Fraser,
who both went out of their way in editing language and text. We are also grateful
to the staff at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for
their support with the preparation of the manuscript for this volume and the re-
lated organizational tasks: Jürgen Baumgarten, Dagmar Fecht, Hannes Gerhardt,
DagmarGülow, Ulrich Kuhnert, Erika Nüssle, Erna Schiwietz, and Rona Unrau.
As editors, we wish to express our gratitude to the authors of this volume for
keeping a strong commitment to this publication and for enduring an editorial
process that took longer and was more intense than any of us had probably an-
ticipated. The Schloessmann Seminar is an ongoing series of workshops by the
Max Planck Society in memory of Dr. Ernst-Rudolf Schloessmann, a former
supporting member of the Society, and especially dedicated to the encourage-
ment of challenging research proposals by young scholars. The aim of the Semi-
nar is to bring young people together, whose voices tell and whose views shape
what most of this volume is about. As a result, we had the opportunity to work
with a dynamic and also mobile group of authors, which turned keeping the list
of affiliations and addresses up-to-date into an ongoing task. Working with this
group has expanded “the sphere of our interest.”
Contents
Section 1
Political Systems and the Experts They Support
1 Scientists as Expert Advisors: Science Cultures Versus National
Cultures?
Horst Rakel 3
2 Experts’ Discourses as Judicial Drama or Bureaucratic Coordination:
Family Debate in the United States and Germany
Wolfgang Walter 27
3 The Integration of Social Science Expertise Into the Political Process:
Did It Actually Happen?
Gabriele Metzler 47
4 Socialist Legal Experts: A New Profession?
Ute Schneider 65
Section 2
Who Is Called Upon as Expert?
5 Folklore Protection in Australia: Who Is Expert in Aboriginal
Tradition?
Christoph Antons 85
6 The Humane Expert: The Crisis of Modern Medicine During the
Weimar Republic
Michael Hau 105
7 Expertise Not Wanted: The Case of the Criminal Law
Jean-Paul Brodeur 123
8 Air Pollution Control: Who Are the Experts?
Matthias Heymann 159
vii
viii Contents
Section 3
Experts, Redefined
9 The Philosopher as Coach
Andreas Føllesdal 181
10 Who Decides the Worth of an Arm and a Leg? Assessing the
Monetary Value of Nonmonetary Damage
Fenna H. Poletiek and Carel J. J. M. Stolker 201
11 The Expert in a Historical Context: The Case of Venetian Politics
Achim Landwehr 215
Section 4
Innovative Representations
12 Mapping Urban Nature: Bio-Ecological Expertise and Urban
Planning
Jens Lachmund 231
13 How to Improve the Diagnostic Inferences of Medical Experts
Ulrich Hoffrage and Gerd Gigerenzer 249
14 Statistical Scientific Evidence and Expertise in the Courtroom
Samuel Lindsey 269
15 The Authority of Representations
Elke Kurz-Milcke 281
Name Index 303
Subject Index 311
Section 1
Political Systems and the Experts They Support
The chapters in this first section span a wide terrain, relating experts and political
systems as historical individuals. The presented case studies make plain that polit-
ical systems are not merely a context for the experts’ agency. Rather, the study of
the experts’ standing and advice can serve as an entrance to the study of the insti-
tutional organizations and the political systems that call upon these experts.
How is it possible that expert advisors in the United States and Europe reach
widely diverging conclusions concerning the standards required to protect pub-
lic health and the environment? Horst Rakel’s chapter brings out how risk assess-
ment and the related interpretation of probabilistic scientific evidence is in the
culture of the beholder, particularly the expert advisor’s national culture. In a
comparative case study of family policy in Germany and the United States in re-
cent decades, Wolfgang Walter argues that the occasionally heated debate sur-
rounding this issue in America, and the comparatively moderate debate in Ger-
many, each are reflections of the organization of experts within the respective po-
litical field. Experts on family policy in Germany and the United States meet in
differing arenas and relate in differing ways to the public discourse. According to
Walter’s analysis, the institutionalized interaction of experts shapes family policy
in the two nations.
As historical individuals, political systems and the specific powers within
them come and go. The chapters by Gabriele Metzler and Ute Schneider empha-
size the transient nature of political systems and the consequent changing de-
mands and opportunities for the experts. Metzler’s case study portrays the inte-
gration of social scientific knowledge into the political process of West Germany
after the Second World War. After the fall of the Nazi regime a modernization of
society and government was to be achieved. Planning, as a scientifically based
political instrument, was regarded as a key to a modern political program, espe-
cially by the Social Democrats. However, as we can learn from Metzler’s analysis,
social scientific expertise prominently took an alternate avenue to cast its influ-
ence on the political and administrative elite in West Germany: higher education
and related informal networks.
Finally, Schneider asks what happens to a professional elite after the political
system that supported this elite comes to an end. In the German Democratic Re-
public, the elite of legal professionals,which has had an extensive history within
Germany, was regarded as an obstacle to the reshaping of society. Schneider
shows how radical changes on one level, the level of the political system, play out
on another, the organizational, with the new regime relying to a significant ex-
tent on the samehistorical individuals, alias experts, across the political divide.
1
Chapter 1
Scientists as Expert Advisors:
Science Cultures Versus National Cultures?
Horst Rakel
Center for Environmental Risks, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
[email protected]
Since the onset of the Enlightenment, the role of science and its scientist(s) has
gained a growing significance in the political sphere of modern societies. Using
scientists as expertadvisors to policymakers is now so commonplace that it rarely
generates public or media interest in the precise nature of the role of, or the in-
put provided by, these experts. On the contrary, expertadvice, these days, is an
essential ingredient in policymaking, supplying the competence and intelligence
necessary to assure the public at large that policies and regulations have been
based on the best knowledge available, provided by sources independent of com-
peting interests. In that sense, science and scientists serve to rationalize policy-
making(Jasanoff, 1990).
However, relative to the experts’ importance in the policymaking process, the
work of these advisors is poorly documented and the construction and the appli-
cation of expert knowledge is rarely scrutinized. This is all the more surprising
given the awareness that all knowledge is preliminaryand/orsocially constructed
(Adorno et al., 1972; Habermas, 1969; Kuhn, 1970). Yet, only a few scholars
have taken up the task to review, systematically and critically, the activities of ex-
pertadvisors in the regulatory process (Foster, Bernstein, & Huber, 1993; Haas,
1992; Irwin, 1995; Jasanoff, 1990; Salter, Leiss, & Levy, 1988). This task has
been approached from differing theoretical perspectives, and a synthesizing
framework of how to analyze expert involvement in policymaking has not yet
been established. Additional complexity arises if we turn to risk-based policy-
making on a multinational or even global level. Apartfromvery few exceptions,
scholarly investigations on expert involvement in policymaking focus either on
issues of risk and decision makingwithin a national framework, or on multina-
tional programs with little or no reference to questions of risk and decision mak-
ing. Thus, we usually find either the internationaldimension or the uncertainty
dimension missing from the analyses.
Given frequentlycompeting, or even contradictory expert advice on risk reg-
ulation, the question arises which factors are responsible for this divergence of
supposedly rational actors, basing their judgment on scientific evidence. So far,
3
4 Horst Rakel
most of the academic debate concerning this question has revolved eitheraround
the national cultures, in which the experts are embedded, or around the science
cultures, to which the experts belong, according to their professional training and
respective affiliations. The thesis pursued by this chapter is that both aspects are
necessary for a comprehensive analysis of expert advice on risk regulation within
an international context. Three theoretical perspectives have been selected that
will serve to show how focusing solely on the nationally or professionally defined
contexts of the role of science and the scientist in standard setting, guideline de-
velopment, and the determination of “best practice” methods is insufficient.
With the accelerating globalization of trade, the harmonization of environ-
mental, health, and safety standards is rapidly becoming a major international is-
sue. Two case studies will help to illustrate the role of scientists as expertadvisors
in the development of environmental, health, and safetyregulationswith multi-
national and global implications; one case studyconcerns the regulation of sew-
age sludge land application, the other the dispute over hormone-raised beef.
Bothcase studies involve a comparison of how the respective issue has been dealt
with in the United States and in the European Union (EU). In each case, the re-
spective regulation was developed on the basis of expert advice and scientific evi-
dence but, nevertheless, led to considerably different regulations in the EU, on
the one hand, and the USA, on the other. The marked differencesbetweenthese
two economic entities will be discussed under three theoretical perspectives:
epistemic community formation (Haas, 1992), a cultural bias theory (Douglas
& Wildavsky, 1982; O’Riordan & Wynne, 1987; Renn, 1995), and a regulatory
science approach (Irwin, Rothstein, Yearley, & McCarthy, 1997; Jasanoff, 1990,
1995). Based on the evidence provided by the two case studies, we will discuss to
what extent these analytical frameworks can provide for a comprehensive inter-
pretation of the role of science and the scientist(s) in the regulatory decision-
making process.
Environmental and Public Health Standard Setting
The interest in the role of science in the environmental and public health stan-
dardsetting has grown over the last decade. Apart from appearing in a number
of scholarly investigations, the subject has also increasingly caught the interest of
national governments and regulatory agencies. In the USA, for instance, product
safety standard setting has been subject to a thorough review by the Office of
Technology Assessment (Garcia, 1992). Recently, the United Kingdom’s Royal
Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded a 3-year study with a de-
tailed report on environmental standard setting (Royal Commission on Envi-
ronmental Pollution, 1998). The reasons behind this increasing attention are
complex and manifold: Two main forces are globalization and scientification.