Research
My research program in the philosophies of technology and expertise is driven by two questions that are central to disputes in both philosophy and the public sphere.
1. How can technology be designed and used so as to promote praiseworthy moral and political ends?
2. What role should experts play in the lives of individuals and groups?
Technological issues are ubiquitous and every technical domain contains experts whose pronouncements and advisement influence public, private, and professional lives. In light of the complexities of exploring my two research questions in this context, I have developed a collaborative research program. I regularly work with philosophers across the analytic-continental divide, collaborate with European colleagues (especially in Roskilde and Twente, where Danish and Dutch researchers also focus on these questions), and co-author books and articles with principals from other disciplines, including professors in engineering, the social sciences, law, and business.
My contribution to these collaborations entails applying a critical philosophical method that I have developed through training in the history of philosophy, phenomenology, the philosophy of technology, and science and technology studies. By appealing to this method, I investigate issues that fall within the horizon of the two guiding questions by rendering explicit the hidden and poorly understood complexities-including the material conditions-that shape the value-laden contexts that structure how technologies and expertise are understood and related to at intellectual and emotional levels. I subject this reconstruction to critical scrutiny, and aim to determine whether unnoticed inconsistencies and other varieties of fallacious reasoning exist, as well as whether using alternative concepts would enable a given position to be better advanced or else exposed as given having less justification than advocates believe.
In what follows I will describe in detail how I advance scholarship on the two questions.
Advancing scholarship on the first question concerning technology requires ongoing inquiry into three inter-related research tracks:
Track I: Determining the general logic of technological transformation as it pertains to the cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral effects of artifacts and technical systems.
Track II: Determining the theoretical strengths and weakness of dominant approaches to normative technology assessment.
Track III: Determining how to best assess contentious issues involving the use of specific artifacts and specific technical systems.
Track I is interdisciplinary and draws from recent scholarship in phenomenology (especially mediation theory, epistemology engine research, and anti-essentialist analyses of identity), critical theory (especially work on democratic participation), cognitive science (especially research on extended and embodied cognition), behavioral economics (especially research on bounded rationality), philosophy of mind (especially inquiry into the extended mind thesis), game theory (especially inquiry into the emergence of cooperation from competitive strategizing) and actor network theory (especially analyses of non-human agency). Ultimately, this track tries to determine the invariant structures of technology-induced change at micro- and macro- levels, and clarify contested concepts that structure policy and philosophical debate, including: “technocracy,” “technological fix,” “instrumentalism,” and “homo faber.” The guiding assumption that animates all of the research in this track is the materialist conviction that avoiding untenable normative recommendations concerning how technology should be used requires knowing how technology actually induces change.
Track II is meta-philosophical and assesses normative arguments concerning how technology should be used. It focuses on recommendations that are justified by outlooks underwritten by phenomenology, virtue ethics, pragmatism, discourse ethics, and cost-benefit analysis (including libertarian paternalism). I prioritize these outlooks because in the philosophy of technology context they tend to be more nuanced than deontological and utilitarian positions.
Track III contains applied philosophical inquiry, often in areas related to globalization and development ethics. Pursuing it provides the theoretical advantage of ensuring that the concepts and perspectives that I advocate for in the first two tracks are not byproducts of an insular philosophical imagination that is too easily captivated by unrealistic thought experiments and overly-simplified empirical examples.
Some of the specific issues that I’ve addressed in Track III include: artificial intelligence (including assessing arguments about the alleged deleterious social consequences of uncritically adopting the computational conception of mind); technology transfer (including assessing claims concerning the use of micro-credit programs that support mobile phones in developing countries); computer simulations of social behavior (including participation in a project that uses computational modeling tools to analyze prejudice reduction); the ease of global travel through transportation technologies and the Internet (including assessing arguments concerning the alleged immorality of visits by well-off people to impoverished regions); cognition enhancement (including assessing the practical consequences that follow from endorsing cyborg conceptions of human existence); behavior-inducing design (including critical analysis of projects ranging from constructing classrooms to foster innovation to engineering artifacts that are supposed to nudge users to engage in ethical action); genetically modified food (including critical analysis of the debates about use in developing nations); and medical imaging technologies (including critical discussion of using sonograms to enhance parental bonding).
To get sense of how my ideas in Track III are beginning to influence other research programs, it is helpful to note that the main researchers participating in the Delft University initiative, “Technology for Human Development: A Capability Approach,” have taken up my work on how to avoid the limitations of neo-classical economics when assessing the impact of technology transfer. My articles on the Grameen Bank’s Village Phone Program have been an important source of inspiration for their project, as is clear from the extensive references in the early publication material and the language found in the proposal itself, which states that I will be consulted on related matters as their project-given 550,000 euros in sponsorship by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research-matures.
Advancing scholarship on the second question concerning expertise requires ongoing inquiry into three inter-related research tracks:
Track IV: Tacit knowledge-how do experts acquire tacit knowledge; how does tacit knowledge structure expert judgment; and how does reliance on tacit knowledge limit the options that are available to experts for engaging with both experts and non-experts?
Track V: Expert authority-what normative obligations are constitutive of expertise, given the cognitive authority that experts possess; and, what are valid normative reasons for non-experts challenging expert authority, given the epistemic asymmetry that typically demarcates experts from non-experts?
Track VI: Applied expertise-how can my philosophical research into expertise be applied so as to effect value-added organizational change and improve upon existing pedagogical theories and practices?
Most of my work in Track IV has been organized around debates with Hubert Dreyfus and Harry Collins. These theorists have articulated extremely sophisticated conceptions of tacit knowledge, and both thinkers connect their views to powerful arguments concerning: the significance of corporeality and bodily learning for knowledge acquisition at individual and collective levels; the difficulties that limit attempts to engineer machines that possess expert human judgment; and, the constraints that tacit knowledge presents in situations where experts intend to justify their outlooks. Since their different disciplinary orientations lead Dreyfus, a philosopher, and Collins, a sociologist, to draw different conclusions about expertise, it is has been useful to study, juxtapose, and critically assess their respective accounts. Such juxtaposition has enabled me to productively extend-albeit in a highly critical way-Collins’s research program on “interactional expertise” and Dreyfus’s suggestions for how to create educational programs that foster committed and active learning. I’ll discuss the details of this extension below in my commentary on Track VI. For purposes of immediate clarification, I’ll restrict my comments to brief explanation of what interactional expertise is.
As defined in the scholarly literature, “interactional” and “contributory” expertise are different, though contributory experts often exhibit interactional expertise too. Contributory experts are the class of professionals designated by the typical use of the word “expert,” e.g., physicists, chemists, materials scientists, engineers, economists, etc. They develop specialist knowledge and skill through formal education and, in many cases, hands on, experiential training. By contrast, interactional experts are not primary practitioners. They learn about a field-including its tacit knowledge-primarily by talking with the people who have acquired contributory expertise. Such deep immersion in the specialist discourse enables them to obtain considerable discursive expertise in specialized domains, even though they lack the practical skills required to make the standard contributions that directly advance the requisite professions. Recent research has isolated interactional expertise as a skill, that comes with fluency in a specialist language that enables the expert to see the world from a specialist’s perspective, and even make jokes and raise devil’s advocate questions that revolve around ideas typically known only to specialists in a field-without actually becoming a contributory expert oneself. Interactional experts are so skilled at “talking the talk” of a field outside of their specialization that their ability is characterized as the capacity to “walk the talk!”
The scholarly literature demonstrates that interactional expertise is the medium of interlocution in properly interdisciplinary research, as well as the medium of exchange that operates between specialized disciplinary knowledge and public understanding in those cases where citizens have acquired a considerable level of expertise for themselves. For example, activist organizations use interactional expertise when they mediate between scientists and concerned citizens, for example in translating public concerns to professionals whose conceptions of risk makes it difficult for them initially to grasp why the public is agitated or distrustful. Additionally, science and technology journalists rely upon interactional expertise when they communicate effectively with the public, as do managers of large-scale science and engineering projects that require coordinating the labor of different specialists.
My work in Track V covers two related topics. First, often in connection with my work on interactional expertise, I have become involved in the political debates about the validity of the “folk wisdom” conception of expertise. According to the various formulations of this view in scholarly and activist circles, members of the public possess more knowledge about scientific and technical matters than experts typically give them credit for. Second, I have begun critical study of a contentious issue that arises in many controversies involving technical dimensions: Do activists have special moral obligations when they make use of technical expertise in the context of advising citizens and politicians?
I am currently pursuing two projects in Track VI: “experiential pedagogy for sustainability ethics” and “interactional expertise and interdisciplinary healthcare”. Both projects revolve around “wicked problems” in which it is difficult to make progress because different experts and different stakeholders frame core issues in different-sometimes seemingly incommensurate-ways.
Inspired by both Dreyfus’s conception of engaged and committed learning through active problem-solving and John Dewey’s views on “productive inquiry,” the goal of the “experiential pedagogy for sustainability ethics” program is to integrate multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary education and research efforts to create a novel, game-based pedagogy of sustainability ethics for science and engineering graduate students. Along with Braden Allenby, Lincoln Professor Of Engineering and Ethics at ASU, and Tom Seager, Associate Professor in the Sustainability Institute at RIT, I am part of a team that is developing a set of recommendations and simulation modules for instructors to consult when they wish to set up a collaborative classroom setting that draws upon science and engineering students’ predilection for experimental learning and teamwork. These deliverables are designed as tools to foster the acquisition of deliberative and participatory skills that will enable students to explore different ethical approaches to “wicked problems” in sustainability through emotionally resonant and cognitively challenging experiences that can be expected to generate a lasting and measurable impact. The National Science Foundation is providing $399, 926 in funding for this initiative. We hope that the students who come to enroll in the course we are designing develop a unique set of skills that enable them to better appreciate- if not develop-the interactive and cognitive abilities that sustainability experts possess.
In an effort to create a pedagogy for teaching sustainability ethics at a global scale, we aim to make use of-and potentially design-new information communication technology tools. To this end, we have applied for internal funds to work with David Schwartz, an RIT professor from the Interactive Games and Media Department.
Critical conversation about the core ideas that structure this project will take place with leading US and European researchers in November at a Copenhagen conference on sustainability that is being jointly directed by myself, two Danish philosophy professors, Soren Riis and Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, and David Gee, a Senior Adviser at the European Environment Agency.
Northern Illinois University is sponsoring the project on interactional expertise and interdisciplinary healthcare. I am working with faculty and administrators to develop a new graduate certificate program that trains healthcare executives to work on interdisciplinary projects that involve participants from the legal, medical, business, and engineering sectors of the healthcare profession. NIU has internal content experts from these respective fields who are addressing issues related patient safety, operations efficiency, and quality and customer satisfaction. My contribution entails developing innovative curricular strategies that center on “interactional expertise” and related concepts that make use of a game-based pedagogy (similar, in many respects, the one used in the sustainability ethics project) that is designed to enable enrolled students-likely mid-career professionals-to: (1) grasp how each discipline frames and discusses the issues that constitute its core knowledge base, (2) grasp why the tacit knowledge that typifies each discipline is not readily-if at all-present in propositional articulations found in the standard literatures, and (3) resolve conflicts that arise when disciplinary impedances hinder effective communication and collaboration. An essay detailing our initial findings and educational hypotheses, “The Colleges of Business, Law, Engineering, and Health and Human Sciences Collaborate to Develop an Innovative Interdisciplinary Healthcare Policy and Management Graduate Certificate Program,” is currently under review with The Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education.
To further this project by advancing the extant understanding of medical collaboration and the transmission of medical expertise, in October I will be co-directing, with Theodore Brown (historian and faculty member of the University of Rochester’s Division of Health Services Research, Community & Preventive Medicine), a Mellon Foundation funded workshop on translational research.
