On the justification of expertise in democratic society

Liana A. Tukhvat­uli­na
Insti­tute of Phi­los­o­phy, Russ­ian Acad­e­my of Sci­ences

On the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of exper­tise in demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety

Abstract. The arti­cle con­sid­ers the prob­lem of the sta­tus of sci­en­tif­ic exper­tise in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety. The author char­ac­ter­izes the ratio­nal­i­ty of exper­tise as a result of the inter­ac­tion and/or con­flict between the agent’s ratio­nal atti­tudes in sci­ence and pol­i­tics. Refer­ring to the ideas of W. Lipp-mann and P. Bour­dieu, the author char­ac­ter­izes the specifics of the sym­bol­ic pow­er of a sci­en­tif­ic expert, not­ing that sci­en­tif­ic exam­i­na­tion in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety is designed to rep­re­sent the state of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge. At the same time, delib­er­a­tive pro­ce­dures can con­tribute to the for­ma­tion of pub­lic con­sen­sus regard­ing the im-ple­men­ta­tion of solu­tions pro­posed by sci­en­tists. The author notes that this kind of self-lim­i­ta­tion of exper­tise could be con­sid­ered as an impor­tant con­di­tion for its depoliti­ciza­tion and preser­va­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic sta­tus itself. She claims that the described dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­ers between experts and the pub­lic helps min­i­mize the risks of tech­nocratism and pop­ulism that are fraught with the devel­op­ment of sci­en­tif­ic exper­tise. In the sec­ond part of the arti­cle, the author con­sid­ers the prob­lem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between dis­ci­plines that are involved in the devel­op­ment of pro­grams for polit­i­cal reform of soci­ety. The author ana­lyzes the con­cept of sci­en­tif­ic impe­ri­al­ism and con­sid­ers the argu­ments of crit­ics of dis­ci­pli­nary expan­sion. She char­ac­ter­izes the stand­points of John Dupree and Tony Law­son, and also recon­structs the ide­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tions under­ly­ing the pro­gram of mod­er­ate uni­fi­ca­tion­ism in the sci­ence by Philip Kitch­er. The author con­cludes that mod­ern epis­te­mol­o­gy is increas­ing­ly turn­ing to polit­i­cal rhetoric in order to eval­u­ate var­i­ous method­olog­i­cal trends. This fea­ture makes it pos­si­ble to assert that the devel­op­ment of exper­tise is char­ac­ter­ized not only by the expan­sion of sci­en­tif­ic ratio­nal­i­ty, but also by the “politi­ciza­tion” (and some­times “democ­ra­ti­za­tion”) of sci­ence itself.

Key­words: exper­tise, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, sci­en­tif­ic impe­ri­al­ism, expan­sion, inter­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty, democ­ra­cy

DOI: 10.5840/dspl2020317

Fund­ing

This research is sup­port­ed by the Russ­ian Foun­da­tion of Basic Research, research project no. 18–011-01097 “Social The­o­ry and Pow­er – Russ­ian Pecu­liar­i­ties” (chap­ters 1–2) and research project no. 17–29-09178 “Analy­sis of Lan­guage and Inter­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty.” (chap­ter 3–4)

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