10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17488
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2038-3460
17488
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Paolo Volonté
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Oxford University Press, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
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Book Reviews
2021-03-09
2023-06-27
2021-03-09
2023-10-16
158-162
TS
Paolo Volonté
2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17488
158
Politecnico di Milano
2038-3460
2
en
162
Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Oxford University Press, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17488/16335
11
158                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

       Rail Crisis – Cause, Consequences and Cure), London, Verso.
Plimmer, G. (2016) Rising NHS trust deficits spark investor concerns, in “Financial
      Times”, June 20th.



                                       ***
   Tom Nichols
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and
Why It Matters, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 252

Paolo Volonté Politecnico di Milano

    According to Wiebe Bijker, Roland Bal and Ruud Hendriks (2009) we
live in paradoxical times. Scientific advice is asked for all serious problems,
but as soon as it is given, citizens, politicians and organizations comment
on and criticize it. This paradox of scientific authority is at the origins of
what has been called a crisis of expertise, a widespread trend which is
grounded not only in socio-technical developments, such as the spread of
social media, but also in cultural and political changes related to new vi-
sions of democracy and the democratization of science.
    The crisis of expertise is a topic that is currently in vogue, and has been
widely discussed in the field of science and technology studies and other
academic communities (Collins and Evans 2007; see issue 3/2003 of “So-
cial Studies of Science”). This area of research is also linked to a more re-
cent, broader debate about the so-called “post-truth era” (see issue 4/2017
of “Social Studies of Science”), which highlights the development of an
“epistemic turn” in Western democracies that produced a less critical re-
lationship with deception (Keyes 2004). Under the aegis of the post-truth
thesis, scholars have shown how a plurality of “truth markets” coexist
within the new post-truth regime (Harsin 2015).
    In this context, it is disappointing that an established scholar such as
Tom Nichols does not feel the need to address the studies and opinions of
his fellow experts, even in a text with pretensions to popular appeal. There
is something paradoxical in describing and stigmatizing the end of exper-
tise without drawing upon the knowledge of experts on the end of exper-
tise. A typical failure on the part of experts that has contributed to the crisis
of expertise is, according to Nichols, cross-expertise violations, that is, the
overconfidence that leads experts to make pronouncements on matters far
beyond their general area of competence and use their own epistemic au-
thority to lend weight to hastily constructed opinions. This book is a bla-
tant example of a political scientist overreaching into a field in which he
lacks competence.
Book Review                                                                  159
     Nevertheless, Nichols’s book, which appeared in English in 2017 and
was immediately translated into Italian for LUISS University Press, at-
tempts to describe this phenomenon by breaking it down into its many
facets. Or, at least, into some of them. The book’s chapters, in fact, address
the main fields in which the death of expertise is taking place, according to
the author.
     First, he describes what he considers a crisis of the ability to argue. In
his view, we are losing the ability to conduct conversations focused on the
“thing itself”, as Husserl would say, where one is able to separate judg-
ments about opinions from judgments about people, to recognize that cer-
tain opinions are more grounded in knowledge and reality than others, and
to change his or her mind. According to Nichols, this inability underlies
well-known phenomena such as echo chambers, confirmation bias and
conspiracy theories that support the dissemination of alternative
knowledge and therefore the crisis of expertise.
     A topic that is very close to the author’s heart is the commercialization
of the American university, that is, the transformation of the relationship
between professors and students, which is increasingly modeled on mar-
keting demands and customer satisfaction rather than on educational pat-
terns. This, he claims, impels teachers to subordinate the contents of their
teaching to the opinions of their audience and therefore to common sense,
indirectly teaching their students that all opinions are equally valid and that
those held by the majority should therefore prevail, regardless of the degree
of expertise of the majority itself.
     Of course, the book would not be complete without a chapter on the
role of the Internet in the crisis of expertise, given that it is one of the most
commonly discussed topics. Nichols’s opinion, however, is that “the Inter-
net is not the primary cause of challenges to the expertise. Rather, the In-
ternet has accelerated the collapse of communication between experts and
laypeople by offering an apparent shortcut to erudition” (p. 105). The
problem with the web is that its infinite scope, combined with the use of
search engines, means that anyone can easily find enough documentation
to convince them still further of the truth of their deeply rooted convic-
tions. Even the most serious crowd-sourced projects, such as Wikipedia,
cannot do without the help of experts to ensure that the contributions of
laypeople are trustworthy. Wikipedia is for Nichols an object lesson in the
limits of the Internet-driven displacement of expertise.
     A chapter addresses the issue of the decline of traditional journalism.
Free information is a major pillar of a democratic society, which in order
to function properly requires well-informed citizens. Nichols’s thesis is that
in a world in which citizens demand to be entertained instead of informed
and journalists work in a hypercompetitive media environment, this essen-
tial function for democracy is becoming lost, along with the function of the
media to discriminate between reliable and unreliable news and
knowledge.
160                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

    Finally, a chapter is dedicated to the role of experts themselves in caus-
ing the crisis of expertise through their mistakes and cheating. In addition
to the aforementioned case of cross-expertise violations, Nichols deals in
detail with the shift from explanations to predictions and the case of de-
ception, such as the manipulation of data and falsification of credentials.
An important aspect that the author emphasizes is that the crisis of trust in
experts is not so much about their specific expertise on given issues as
about their ability to apply that expertise when it comes to matters of pub-
lic policy.
    To summarize the main thesis of the book, for Nichols we are witness-
ing more than a natural skepticism towards experts. We are witnessing the
growth of a stubborn form of ignorance, which is generated by “an increas-
ingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of ine-
quality of any kind” (p. 4). The death of expertise is the result of the spread
of a form of ignorance which is so radical as to deprive those whom it af-
flicts of the ability to realize it, and therefore make them prey to the Dun-
ning-Kruger Effect, according to which the dumber the individual, the
more confident s/he is that s/he is not actually dumb.
    Yet the fundamental point that escapes Nichols is that, on the contrary,
the crisis of expertise is not a crisis of ignorance, but a crisis of trust. It is
not about individual education or the qualities of “people”, but rather the
relationship between experts and laypeople in contemporary society. The
case of vaccines is significant in this regard. As Nichols himself observes,
the parents most likely to resist vaccines are not found among small-town
mothers with little schooling, but among educated San Francisco subur-
banites in Marin County: “While these mothers and fathers are not doc-
tors, they are educated just enough to believe they have the background to
challenge established medical science” (p. 21). The fact that they are edu-
cated people suggests that what motivates them is not the rejection of ex-
pertise and experts, but the awareness (absent in less educated people) that
there are other experts besides those who are institutionally legitimized.
That is, the awareness that experts may disagree with each other, and that
consequently the institutionalized expertise of doctors and scientists is not
necessarily true. The crisis of expertise is, in short, very different from the
“death of expertise”: it does not concern the recognition of the legitimacy
of the epistemic authority of experts, but it questions whose epistemic au-
thority should be recognized. The current crisis of expertise seems to be
the result not so much of an aggressive rejection of epistemic authority as
of greater independence of the lay public in choosing the network of ex-
perts to whom they are willing to grant such authority.
    If we consider the problem from this point of view, we are encouraged
to address a number of issues about scientific controversies, boundary
work strategies, the construction of the ideas of science and pseudo-sci-
ence, the dynamics of stabilization of knowledge claims, reputational poli-
cies of institutionalized and alternative knowledge networks, and so on. In
Book Review                                                                161
other words, this would open up a vast set of issues within the sociology of
knowledge that the current debate on the crisis of expertise has not yet
fully scrutinized. However, Nichols fails to deal with such issues, not only
because of his approach as described above, but also because the scientific
interest that drives his research focuses on the political dimension of the
problem. This becomes clear in the book’s conclusions. When trust be-
tween experts and citizens collapses, Nichols writes, “experts and laypeo-
ple become warring factions. And when that happens, democracy itself can
enter a death spiral that presents an immediate danger of decay either into
rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy” (p. 216). The death of ex-
pertise interests him as a dysfunction of democracy itself, not as a moment
of transformation of knowledge production processes. Therefore, the re-
formulation of the title in the Italian edition seems appropriate.
    Nichols has produced a rather US-centric journalistic pamphlet, which
is easy to read but rather meagre in terms of content and depth and which
is ultimately yet another of the many outpourings of old-fashioned univer-
sity professors as they rail against the decay of their own institution, their
own prestige, and the quality of their students. The nostalgia for an elite
university institution, a form of university that exists only in the memories
of the older generations, recalls ways of approaching modernity à la Ortega
y Gasset, and makes Nichols appear to be a fundamentally conservative
observer. He blames stereotypes, but the protagonists of his narrative are
themselves highly stereotyped figures, such as “citizens”, “experts”, “stu-
dents”, “journalists” and, above all, “people”. Society is flattened into cat-
egories, which do not do justice to actual social subjects. Who are the ex-
perts? It makes a big difference if we are thinking of scientists (experts in
the production of knowledge) or of professional groups such as lawyers
(experts in the use of expert knowledge). Even within the limited sphere
of those who produce new knowledge, the crisis of expertise acquires dif-
ferent meanings – and will produce different effects – if the experts who
are affected by the crisis are researchers in institutionalized fields of west-
ern science, developers of innovative, cutting edge areas of research, dis-
seminators, consultants to policy makers, or experts in alternative
knowledge (pseudoscience). To flatten the complexity of such a complex
landscape is to do the reader a disservice, even the generic “educated
reader” at whom this volume is probably aimed.
    Mark Twain is reported to have once affirmed in a letter to the New
York Journal, commenting on rumors that he was gravely ill or even dead:
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. As observed by
Gil Eyal in his The Crisis of Expertise (2019), this applies to the death of
expertise as well. After all, he notes (Eyal 2019, 3), “whenever a book is
published with the title ‘The death of … (common sense, books, money,
white privilege, or what have you),’ it’s a fair bet that Twain’s quip holds,
the reports are greatly exaggerated, and the subject of the lament is grate-
fully invigorated by the renewed interest in its health”.
162                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

References
Bijker, W., Bal, R. and Hendriks, R. (2009) The Paradox of Scientific Authority:
    The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.
Collins, H. and Evans, R. (2007) Rethinking Expertise, Chicago, University of Chi-
   cago Press.
Eyal, G. (2019) The Crisis of Expertise, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Harsin, J. (2015) Regimes of Post-truth, Post-politics, and Attention Economies, in
   “Communication, Culture and Critique”, 8, pp. 327-333.
Keyes, R. (2004) The Post-Truth Era. Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary
   Life, New York, St. Martin’s Press.



                                       ***
   N. Oudshoorn
Resilient Cyborgs. Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators,
London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 350

Veronica Moretti Università di Bologna

    Providing an autonomous review of a medical book during a moment
in history when the ubiquitous COVID-19 pandemic progressively has re-
shaped the imagined future of health and illness has been a challenging
task. Other diseases look anachronistic. Nelly Oudshoorn's book Resilient
Cyborg is a strong call to the “COVID-aside reality”, telling us how some
people are living and dying with pacemakers and defibrillators, which are
intrusive technologies surgically implanted in patients’ bodies. Pacemakers
and defibrillators have changed radically over the past few decades (the
first prototype for a pacemaker was introduced in 1985), considering that
at the beginning, they were used only for patients who had survived cardiac
arrest. Nowadays, these medical devices transform subjects into “mundane
cyborgs”.
    The book’s core argument is that people living with defibrillators and
pacemakers are far from being passive entities. With a strong empirical fo-
cus, the volume takes the reader on a journey inside and outside what the
author calls “everyday cyborg bodies” (p. 17).
    Oudshoorn’s book is structured around four main parts (“Introduc-
tion: theorising the resilience of hybrid bodies”; “Technogeographies of
resilience”; “Resilience and difference”; and “How hybrid bodies fall
apart”).
    The first part (Chapters 1-2) theorises on the resilience of hybrid bod-
ies, a concept that has inspired many STS scholars (but not exclusively) to
