Nonexpertise Negative Space or Negation (1)

Nonexpertise: Negative Space or Negation of the Negation?
Paper presented at AAA-2011 | Montreal QC | 2011.11.17
Ryan J. Cook | Saint Xavier University
draft version--do not cite without author's permission
This paper resulted from pulling at one seemingly minor thread in my own research and
discovering just how many other areas of scholarship it was connected to. When I initially set
out to study the interactions among what I framed as knowledge experts in central Mexico, I had
little hint that those whom I was by default categorizing as nonexperts would become
theoretically important in their own right. Once I dove into the literature on expertise, it became
apparent that this nonexpert category was used unproblematically yet posed significant
theoretical, ethical, and practical challenges. As Fuller and Collier (2004:236) note, "an ironic
consequence of the increasing division of cognitive labor in society is that more of us, for more
of the time, share the role of nonexpert. This universal sense of nonexpertise is the epistemic
basis for reconstructing the public sphere today". If this is so, why does nonexpertise go
undertheorized? What would happen if studies of expertise took nonexpertise equally seriously?
To complement the other papers on this panel, and to perhaps spur further investigation, I
will focus on nonexpertise. For context, I begin with a brief description of how the issue arose in
the course of my fieldwork. The paper continues with a selective overview of the conventional
scholarship treating nonexpertise. And in the last section I present a critical appraisal of two
approaches to rethinking nonexpertise already in evidence in the scholarship.

Knowledge politics and nonexpertise under the volcano
I had little sense that nonexpertise would pose such challenges when I arrived in Puebla in 2002
for 11 months of fieldwork. At the center of my interest was the active volcano Popocatépetl
and the several groups of social actors who argued publicly about how best to understand it.

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Since the volcano's 1994 reactivation, potentially threatening millions of Mexicans in the capital
and four contiguous states, the federal government has employed academic earth scientists to
generate sensor data and computer models that would serve as the basis for disaster
management efforts (Macías Medrano 2005). These volcanologists and geophysicists, whether
placing or checking sensors, attending public meetings in what they defined as the high-risk
zone, or giving interviews to broadcast news, are consistently brought into proximity with
representatives of the mountain towns' residents. Prominent among them are the latest in a long
line of indigenous ritual practitioners, known variously as tiemperos, graniceros, quiatlazquis,
and misioneros del temporal. The purview of these "weather-workers" includes interpreting

meteorological and volcanic phenomena, organizing offerings to the volcano spirit, don
Gregorio, and his companion in nearby Iztaccíhuatl, Rosita, and healing certain weather-linked
illnesses (Albores and Broda 1997; Broda, Iwaniszewski, and Montero 2001; Glockner 1996).
The other counterbalance to the scientific and technocratic views of the volcano scientists and
their state patrons comes from domestic UFO investigators, ovniólogos (from OVNI, objeto
volador no identificado) or ufólogos (Martínez Jiménez 1992; Sheaffer 1998) who collect reports
of aerial anomalies in the vicinity of the volcano. Engaged with these experts is a range of
interested participants: government functionaries; media organizations and journalists;
anthropologists; and local residents.
By studying each of these groups where they worked (academic laboratories, home
offices, sacred sites) and by collecting print and broadcast media featuring them, I have sought
to illuminate the processes by which social actors constitute themselves as experts. I developed
a tripolar model that accounted for the three-way boundary-work (Gieryn 1999) and epistemic
alignments (Latour 1997; Rouse 1996) that were integral to their efforts. In my dissertation
(Cook 2004) I proposed that actors constitute themselves as expert by positioning others as
relative counter-experts or nonexperts. Counterexperts, "individuals who can dispute technical
experts on their own terms" (Brand and Karvonen 2007:24) and who arise once science

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broadens its social relevance but loses its unique enlightening and reality-defining powers
(Loudin 2003; Pfadenhauer 2006), drew the bulk of my attention at the time. Competitors
seeking expert status singled out one figure to use as a counterexpert foil in dealing with those
thereby designated as nonexperts: for instance, a number of volcanologists expressed
exasperation with ufologists for adding to the media-consuming public's confusion on what was
and was not "real" science (Cook 2004:232 233).
While I did not elaborate on the nonexpert role in my dissertation beyond a brief
speculative aside, it has loomed increasingly large in my thinking. For instance, the strategy of
volcano residents is in many cases to perform their nonexpertise for the experts in the
government and the academy, repeatedly professing ignorance of official data and plans, yet in
so doing they gain some measure of control over how disaster management plans are
implemented. Media personnel and government functionaries play the role of nonexperts as
interlocutors with the scientific experts on the public s behalf, both to communicate official
plans and to reinforce scientific expertise and authority. The disclaimer of nonexpertise is even
uttered by other scholars, possessing doctorates and university positions and public roles, when
they defer to their volcano science peers, usually in the restricted matters of geophysics or

monitoring and modeling.

Ground against figure: nonexpertise in recent scholarship
With the benefit of some critical distance, and the motivation of this panel, I recently returned to
the issue of nonexpertise. There is no shortage of research and theorizing on expertise, as
multiple edited volumes (Ericsson et al. 2006; Feltovich, Ford, and Hoffman 1997; Selinger and
Crease 2006) and review articles (Carr 2010) attest. In this literature, expertise seems much
more straightforward than does its counterpart, if we are to judge by the range of terms
employed to differentiate nonexperts from experts. "Lay" or "layperson", "public", "naive",

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"novice", "amateur", and "everyday" all appear, sometimes woven into elaborate typologies,
sometimes used indiscriminately, yet rarely clearly or independently defined.
Nonexpertise is integral to this ever-expanding scholarship, yet in a manner analogous to
negative space in art. It is a relative absence surrounding the subject that makes it stand out all

the more clearly. Indeed, nonexpertise, when it is treated at all, is usually defined by negation:
nonexperts are whatever experts are not, or they lack whatever experts have. The negativity
falls into several key categories, which I will summarize below, preserving in so far as possible
the divergences and disagreements in the literature.

Nonexpertise and who knows
The basis for defining and delineating (non)expertise in much of the expertise literature tends to
be epistemic. Experts have more knowledge than nonexperts, or they have special knowledge
that the latter do not, and this imbalance constitutes the rationale for their autonomy and power
(Ericsson 2006; Margolis 1996). Such a quantitative view has characterized such various efforts
as constructing so-called "expert systems" in artificial intelligence (Buchanan, R. Davis, and
Feigenbaum 2006) and the multifarious programs to improve the "public understanding of
science" (Irwin and Wynne 1996) and the consequent compliance of nonexperts-as-objects.
In more cognitively oriented studies, expertise means knowledge or habits of mind that
nonexperts could in theory (if never in practice) acquire (Jenkins 2010; Mieg 2006). While some
studies indicate that nonexperts use the same cognitive tools (Webster et al. 2010) or exhibit
thinking shaped by analogous biases (Wright, Bolger, and Rowe 2002; Wright, Pearman, and
Yardley 2000), they claim nonexperts do so less accurately or consistently than do experts
(Baker et al. 2010; Beach 1992; Kaufman, Baer, and J.C. Cole 2009). Contrarians in this vein
show how designated experts prove themselves no better than nonexperts at tasks like risk

assessment (Hanea et al. 2010; Rowe and Wright 2001), technology assessment (Philippon et

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al. 2007), or isolating deception (Reinhard et al. 2002). Yet in most other studies, significant,
measurable differences are invoked to set the two apart.
A third differentiation, mainly in studies of sports or other performances, is that nonexperts
manifest some other deficit of ability, though a similar dispute regarding the potential acquisition
of this ability appears in the literature. These include rate of improvement and ultimate level of
attainment in motor tasks (Howard 2009), perceptual acuity and accuracy (Cousin and Siegrist
2010; Mann et al. 2007), recall from memory (André and Fernand 2008), and problem solving
(Ayton 1992; Sánchez-Manzanares, Rico, and Gil 2008).

Nonexpertise and who matters
A second major way in which nonexperts figure in the literature, if in an occluded way (Fuller
and Collier 2004:236), is the moral and practical matter of whose input counts in decisionmaking, especially in exceptional situations like crises. The essential question is: who merits

deference on technical issues? Increasing reliance on experts causes complications for firms--in
which changes to customary decision-making are subverted by specialization (Mohr 1994)--and
for liberal democracies--in which rough political equality is challenged by epistemic inequality
(McDonell 1997; Turner 2001). Yet the increasing complexity attending the expansion of
neoliberal governance and the uneven integration of the global marketplace has driven
policymakers and corporate owners alike to rely more on experts (Beck 1992).
Some studies, taking a Habermasian tack, suggest that the incommensurability of the lay
"lifeworld" and the scientific realm means nonexperts can only either trust or resist experts
(Turner 2001:123), that a fundamental conflict exists between having their political rights or their
epistemic powers recognized (Durant 2008). Some assert that increasing inclusiveness in who
can make recognized knowledge claims has its own negative consequences (McDonell 1997),
among them a technocratic self-disciplining of any who would intervene in public debates
(Pearson 2009). A common counterargument to both is that, whether or not they understand

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experts' knowledge, nonexpert citizens have both the political leverage and the moral
responsibility to hold experts accountable for the validity of that knowledge (Hartelius 2011:62;
Mieg 2001:14; Turner 2001:144 145), which they do by granting or withholding their trust.
However they frame the relationship between nonexperts and experts, studies of this type
show how the latter, with its formal knowledge and codified practices (Brand and Karvonen
2007), is usually privileged by technocracy and bureaucracy. Modern expertise in fact has an
intimate relationship with the technocratic order (Burris 1989; Topçu 2008), making
nonexpertise an inescapable (if variably designated) role. Nonexperts matter in these studies to
the extent that they pose challenges to technocratic management and to experts' professional
conduct. Hence the concern exhibited in legal studies (Boccaccini and Brodsky 2002; Mnookin
1999; Tye 1997; T. Ward 2006), medical sociology (Condit and Bates 2005; Gingras 2005;
Sanders, Diamond, and Vidmar 2002; Springett 2008; Zadravec, Grad, and So an 2006), and
studies of risk and disaster (Drottz-Sjöberg 1991) with how professionals in each field should
best deal with nonexperts as clients, opponents, or obstacles. Contrarians in this vein,
frequently from natural resource management (Gootee et al. 2010; Reeves 2008) and risk
assessment and communication (Hampel 2006; Young and Matthews 2007), discuss turning the
liability of dealing with nonexperts into an advantage. Although an increasing number of studies
take nonexpert "expertise" seriously as a resource and nonexperts themselves as junior
partners (see medical sociology: e.g., Kerr, Cunningham-Burley, and Amos 1998; Nordin 2000;
Popay and G. Williams 1996), the inclusion of nonexperts and their "mental models" for most is

explicitly instrumental: to make expert management go more smoothly (Jenkins 2010; Krystallis
et al. 2007; Lipworth et al. 2009; Owen et al. 1999).

Foregrounding nonexpertise
Two observations struck me in this review of the literature. One is that to a large extent the
nonexperts who populate technical reports and scholarly research papers are a figment of the

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technocratic and academic imaginaries (Blok, Jensen, and Kaltoft 2008; Maranta et al. 2003;
Roos 2007). The other is that a good number of scholars are in fact trying to rethink
nonexpertise, even if none of them state it explicitly as their focus. I will review and appraise two
promising approaches already evident in the expertise literature. In their own way, and taken
collectively, they go some distance towards negating the original negation of sundering expert
from nonexpert.1

1. Nonexpertise as knowledge
The first approach derives from a strain of science studies, usually focusing on the relations
among scientists and nonscientists in high-stakes public decisions, in which members of the lay
public are valorized as capable political actors and possessors of valid knowledge (Healy 2009).
Knowledge and skill are distributed unevenly in social life, and not precisely as the
expert/nonexpert boundary-work would suggest (Popay and Williams 1996). Furthermore, the
distinctions made between expert and nonexpert, knowledge and ignorance, science and
society, are fluid and fragile (Bell and Sheail 2005); once drawn in one context, they don't
automatically transfer to others, and frequently have to be redrawn.
This means practically that "realizing one s self as an expert can hinge on casting other
people as less aware, knowing, or knowledgeable" (Carr 2010:22). Do nonexperts identify as
such by casting other people as more knowledgeable? In many cases, certainly, but not without
some ambivalence and contestation. For instance, medical patients (Gülich 2003; I. Shaw 2002)
and those at risk from hazards (Burningham, Fielding, and Thrush 2008; Gilgan 2001; Roth
2004; Wisner et al. 2004) may in most things defer to designated experts while still claiming the
expertise of knowing their own experiences better than experts can. Other nonexperts go
beyond this to make a recognized contribution to experts' understanding of their experiences,
Unlike either Hegel or Marx and Engels, I don't propose this reframing as some kind of dialectical law of
development, rather as one potential and not at all assured move.

1

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even if the experts did not ask for it (Epstein 1995). Still others, like the weather-workers, accept
their nonexpertise in science but assert the validity of a whole other epistemological system
(Cook 2004), which may not "articulate" either by engaging with larger audiences or by making
itself clear in cosmopolitan or technocratic terms (Choy 2005).
Paradoxically this approach seeks to boost the epistemic respectability of nonexperts by
playing up the alterity and scientific incommensurability of their knowledge (e.g., Healy 2009)-variously termed "folk epistemology" (Taylor 1992), "civic epistemology" (Wynne 2003), "lay
epistemology" (Irwin and Michael 2003), or "street science" (Corburn 2002). Such an
epistemology is portrayed as local, contextual, and practical (Eden 1996; Ricci, Bellaby, and
Flynn 2010); as privileging individual subjective experience (Corburn 2002; Cytryn 2001;
McClean and A. Shaw 2005; Whelan 2001) and collective identities and traditions (McKechnie
1996; Satterfield 1997; Vouligny, Domon, and Ruiz 2009); and as addressing risks by mixing
knowledge, intuition, and moral judgments (Cytryn 2001; Maschio 2007; Neil, Malmfors, and
Slovic 1994; Sjöberg 1998; Slimak and Dietz 2006). This presents an interesting resonance with
work seeking to validate traditional indigenous knowledge (Leach and Fairhead 2002; Mahiri
1998). Yet where "citizen scientists" attempt to engage conceptually and morally with
universalizing Western science, indigenous knowledge experts generally seek disengagement
from science and its experts. (The enthusiastic boundary-work between volcano scientists and
ufologists, and the divergence in respect accorded by volcano scientists and weather-workers to
each other, seem to support this characterization.)
Trying to convey the reframing of nonexperts as experts in their own right leads scholars
to proffer circumlocutions like "lay expert" (Prior 2003) or "system expert" (Mieg 2001) or "local
expert" (McKechnie 1996). So long as it captures the heterogeneity of nonexperts (Lee and
Zhang 2004; Selinger and Mix 2006), and thus engages with work illustrating the diversity of
experts (Campbell 1985; Collins and Evans 2007; Fischer 2003; Turner 2001), this advances
theorizing. This would extend anthropological efforts to culturally contextualize Western science

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as one more human knowledge system (e.g., Adas 1990; Downey and Dumit 1997; Harding
2008; Worseley 1997) as well as efforts in science studies to treat science as one more human
activity capable of sociological analysis, albeit an elite (Fuller 2002), esoteric (Collins and Evans
2007; Frank 1949; Hronzsky 2003), or even deviant (Neidhardt 1993) one.

2. Nonexpertise as role-playing
A second approach proceeds from the recognition that "almost anyone can act as an expert"-or, conversely, as a nonexpert--for someone else in an increasingly fragmented and opaque
public sphere (Mieg 2006:746). Given this relational and contingent nature, what is necessary to
focus on is how actual people achieve and inhabit these roles in the course of situated social
interaction (Jacoby and Gonzalez 1991; Matoesian 1999; Mieg 2001; Rifkin and Martin 1997).
The question thus becomes why and under what conditions someone would take on the role of
nonexpert vis-à-vis someone else.
Since certain types of expertise are only as valid as a nonexpert constituency is prepared
to endorse (Hartelius 2011:23 25), taking the nonexpert role can have some significant
influence. Such is the case with marginalized knowledges like ufology, whose exponents must
rely heavily on the attention and income of an audience to continue with their research as no
conventional funding sources are available (Story 1980; Sturrock 2000). In other realms, such
as alternative medicine or therapy, where it is easier to move from relative nonexpert to relative
expert, people may disavow expert status for its negative connotations or its distancing effects
(McClean and A. Shaw 2005; Pedersen and Baarts 2010; Stover 2004). Both ufologists and
weather-workers exhibit this when they appeal for credibility by disavowing connections to
credentialed, establishment scientists (though reiterating connections to Science) (cf. Ferriz and
Siruguet 1981; Randle 1999). In still other cases, especially where decisions must be made (or
legitimized), nonexperts reassure themselves by selecting someone else to act as expert (Bell
and Sheail 2005).

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This relational/interactional approach to nonexpertise supports the findings that what
qualifies as science, expertise, and even knowledge is in many ways open and contested. The
roles themselves can be precarious and contingent, especially in controversial areas (Dew and
Lloyd 1997). I experienced just such role-playing under uncertainty when I was invited on a local
Puebla variety TV show as an expert on the ethnography of the Popocatépetl region. I found
myself sharing the set with the director of the state satellite office, Mexico's most visible
ufologist, and a host who tried to create "good TV" by soliciting our comments on photos of
mysterious "letters" that had appeared in the snows of Iztaccíhuatl that morning in conjunction
with a UFO report. The encounter succinctly recapitulated in real-time the dance claimants of
expertise enact over how to interpret phenomena, whose approaches should be respected
(exactly how far), and how not to overtly disparage those playing the counterexpert role or
alienate their nonexpert audience.

Conclusion
By whichever path we approach the issue of (non)expertise, we ought not to ignore the ways in
which inequalities in the ideological arena shape how agentive actors can be in positioning self
and other. Some find it easier to argue for (non)expert status due, on the one hand, to
institutional links or their absence--imagine a university geologist disclaiming expert knowledge
of Popocatépetl, and then imagine a ufologist doing the same--and, on the other, to intellectual
fashions and political sensitivities--few in the volcanic villages would at this point choose to be
aligned with "the experts", for example. Nor can we evade the responsibility of dealing
forthrightly with the ever-expanding shadow zone of nonexpertise noted by Fuller and Collier. I
have indicated two approaches to mapping the shadowy and unsettled landscape of expertise,
already evident but underutilized in the range of scholarly literature, that attend to both these
concerns by recentering on nonexpertise.

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