Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective

A Dialogue on a Paradigm Case of Bad Science, Alan Sokal

SERRC — May 23, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Alan Sokal, New York University, sokal@nyu.edu.

Sokal, Alan. “A Dialogue on a Paradigm Case of Bad Science: Comment on Brian Martin.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 36-47.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-49h

Image by Bill Smith via Flickr / Creative Commons

The following article replies to Martin, Brian. “Bad Social Science.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective8, no. 3 (2019): 6-16.

I am very sympathetic to Professor Martin’s central thesis: that much social and political commentary — by citizens, journalists and even academics — makes

claims about society and social relationships that fall very far short of what social scientists consider good scholarship. This might be due to using false or misleading evidence, making faulty arguments, drawing unsupported conclusions or various other severe methodological, empirical or theoretical deficiencies.

I also agree that

there is value in a more systematic examination of different sorts of everyday bad social science. Such an examination can point to what is important in doing good social science and to weaknesses in assumptions, evidence and argumentation. It can also provide insights into how to defend and promote high-quality social analysis.

And finally, I agree completely that ad hominem argument is ethically reprehensible and intellectually vacuous, as is the misrepresentation of an opponent’s claims or arguments; and that ambiguous terminology, failing to summarize clearly an opponent’s main arguments, and criticizing an opponent’s weakest arguments while ignoring the strongest ones are also logically and ethically deficient strategies (though these sins are perhaps slightly less iniquitous than ad hominem and misrepresentation).

I also endorse Martin’s suggestion that one should verify claims — particularly derogatory claims about opponents — with the people involved, and more generally that it can be useful to send drafts of articles to people with opposing views, soliciting their comments and suggestions prior to publication. Indeed, I can personally testify that Martin practices what he preaches; and I beg the reader’s indulgence to tell this story in a bit of detail, because I think it illustrates well why Martin’s suggestion is so valuable.

Friendship and Intellectual Integrity Among Conflicts

Back in January 2019, Professor Martin sent me a draft of his almost-completed article, saying:

Attached is a draft article, “Bad social science”. In it, I discuss your hoax [Sokal 1996]. Could you have a look at the relevant subsection . . . and let me know about any inaccuracies or omissions? Comments on any other part of the article would be welcome too.

After reading his draft, I replied:

I want first to say “thank you” once again for sending this draft to me for my comments prior to publishing it . . . For indeed, I believe that you have seriously misrepresented my views.

And I went on to explain:

The first sentence [of the section discussing my hoax] is fine. You then say: “He [Sokal] concluded from this episode that cultural studies as a field lacked rigour and quality control.” But where is the precise citation to back up such a claim? Your footnote 24 [deleted from the final version] cites a 465-page book [Sokal 2008], but without any citation of page numbers, much less precise quotations. (I am always irritated by such vague citations, which are useless to the reader — but actually worse than useless because they give the impression of documentation without the reality of it.) In fact, I don’t know anywhere in my writings where you could find a quotation asserting what you have written, because it is not at all my view. Indeed, I have many times explicitly written the exact opposite!

After which I quoted at length from an article I wrote about a year after the hoax, which reads in part:

From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science — much less sociology of science — is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) . . .[1]

Professor Martin immediately responded to thank me for “sav[ing] [him] from making some unfortunate mistakes”, and two weeks later he sent me a revised version of his article for my comment; I found its account of my views completely acceptable, and it is the version that is published here.

Let me also stress that Martin did not take the easy way out: making the minimum changes to his text to avoid stating an outright falsehood, while nevertheless holding onto the essence of his conclusion. Rather, he did the intellectually honorable thing: completely revising his conclusion in light of the new evidence I had given him.

And that, indeed, is what is so valuable about sending drafts to people with opposing views: it gives us the opportunity to change and improve our ideas, via exposure to new evidence and/or persuasive new reasoning.

On Matters of Fact and Rhetoric in Vaccine Debates

I do not feel qualified to comment on the details of Martin’s analysis of the Australian vaccination debate, with which I am not familiar. However, I can make a few brief comments about his examples:

1) I agree with Martin that it is justified to call someone a “liar” only if one has strong evidence that the person in question is consciously intending to deceive. In the type of situation cited by Martin, a more appropriate accusation might be “persisted in making claims that had been refuted by strong evidence, without addressing that evidence”.

Of course, as Martin replied to me, participants on different sides of the controversy might well have “different assumptions about what is relevant evidence . . . and different assessments of the relevance of evidence”. But these assumptions can and should be made explicit, and these assessments openly debated. If one side (or both sides) in the controversy refuses to do so, then that refusal deserves to be criticized.

2) I also agree with Martin that it is unhelpful to use inflammatory terms such as “babykiller”, even when the implicit factual claim — that discouraging vaccination causes the death of children from vaccination-preventable diseases — is supported by evidence. Furthermore, as concerns measles — the disease most at danger of resurgence due to anti-vaccination campaigns — death is fortunately nowadays very rare in the developed countries, occurring in only one or two cases per thousand.[2]

So, despite large-scale outbreaks of measles on a scale not seen in decades — like the one that is occurring in the USA even as I write, with 704 cases thus far, of which 66 hospitalizations[3] — there have not yet been any deaths. Consequently, if we were to consider the situation of the USA, Europe or Australia in isolation from the rest of the world, “babykiller” would indeed be a gross exaggeration.

But ideas (such as the alleged dangers of vaccination) are not stopped by national borders; and the nonchalance available to parents in the rich countries does not, alas, extend to the vast majority of humanity. As the Wikipedia article on measles usefully summarizes:

Measles affects about 20 million people a year, primarily in the developing areas of Africa and Asia. . . . It is one of the leading vaccine-preventable disease causes of death. In 1980, 2.6 million people died of it, and in 1990, 545,000 died; by 2014, global vaccination programs had reduced the number of deaths from measles to 73,000. Rates of disease and deaths, however, increased in 2017 to 2019 due to a decrease in immunization. . . . Most of those who die from the infection are less than five years old.

In developed countries, death occurs in one to two cases out of every 1,000 (0.1–0.2%). In populations with high levels of malnutrition and a lack of adequate healthcare, mortality can be as high as 10%. In cases with complications, the rate may rise to 20–30%.[4]

The World Health Organization reports that

A previously described model for estimating measles disease and mortality was updated with new data on measles vaccination coverage and cases . . . During 2000–2017, as compared with no measles vaccination, measles vaccination prevented an estimated 21.1 million deaths globally.[5]

So perhaps “babykiller” (or rather, “child-killer”) is not so out of line, after all.

Still, I agree with Martin that when accusations such as “babykiller” are employed without citation of evidence to support the implicit factual claim, this constitutes bad social science.

On the Miserable Persistence of Wakefield

3) With regard to the notorious case of Andrew Wakefield, Martin says that

Incorrect statements about Wakefield are commonplace, for example that he lost his medical licence due to scientific fraud. It is a simple matter to check the facts, but apparently few do this.

So I did check the facts — which is indeed a fairly simple matter, though a bit time-consuming to do properly — and obtained results that are in stark contrast to Martin’s portrayal.

In response to accusations of scientific fraud and other ethical violations in the research reported by Wakefield and his co-authors in the Lancet (Wakefield et al. 1998) — which purported to find a possible causal link between the measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccination and autism — the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council (GMC) conducted an investigation that involved “evidence and submissions for 148 days over a period of two and a half years” followed by 45 days of deliberation in camera, and which applied the evidentiary standard of proof “beyond reasonable doubt”.[6] The GMC report began its analysis of the Lancet paper by observing that Wakefield

knew or ought to have known that [his] reporting in the Lancet paper of a temporal link between the syndrome [he] described [gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children] and the MMR vaccination,

i) had major public health implications,

ii) would attract intense public and media interest,

and that he

i) knew or ought to have known the importance of accurately and honestly describing the patient population,

ii) had a duty to ensure that the factual information in the paper and provided by [him] in response to queries about it was true and accurate,

iii. had a duty to disclose to the Editor of the Lancet any disclosable interest including matters which could legitimately give rise to a perception that [he] had a conflict of interest.

The report found that Wakefield’s conduct was “dishonest” and “irresponsible” in all three aspects:

1) The Lancet paper — of which Wakefield was the senior author — provided “a misleading description of the patient population” and of the process by which the patients were recruited, implying — albeit without stating explicitly — that

the children who were the subject of the paper . . . [came by] a routine referral to the gastroenterology department in relation to symptoms which included gastrointestinal symptoms [and by] a routine process in which the investigators had played no active part.[7]

The GMC found both implied assertions to be false and judged Wakefield’s behavior to be “dishonest”, “irresponsible” and “contrary to your duty to ensure that the information in the paper was accurate”.[8]

2) In response to critics’ worries that there might have been a biased selection of patients, Wakefield responded in the Lancet by stating unequivocally that

These children have all been seen expressly on the basis that they were referred through the normal channels (eg, from general practitioner, child psychiatrist, or community paediatrician) on the merits of their symptoms.[9]

The GMC determined that this statement was “dishonest”, “irresponsible” and “contrary to your duty to ensure that the information provided by you was accurate”:

The Panel has found that your statement . . . does not respond fully and accurately to the queries made by correspondents to the Lancet . . . . [Y]ou knew that this statement omitted necessary and relevant information, such as the active role you played in the referral process, and the fact that the referral letters in four cases made no mention of any gastrointestinal symptoms and the fact that the investigations had been carried out under Project 172-96 for research purposes. Therefore, the Panel is satisfied that your conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.[10]

In response to another correspondent’s suspicion that some of Wakefield’s patients might be connected to the MMR litigation — a potential source of selection bias — Wakefield admitted for the first time that “one author (AJW) has agreed to help evaluate a small number of these children on behalf of the Legal Aid Board” — a vast understatement, as we shall soon see — but insisted categorically that “No conflict of interest exists.”

Ironically, Wakefield’s reply began with the correct observation that “Bias occurs in science when data are either wittingly or unwittingly concealed.”[11]

3) Similarly, a month after the Lancet article, at an important scientific meeting at the Medical Research Council

convened to examine the evidence relating to measles or measles vaccine and chronic intestinal inflammation, you were asked about the issue of bias in generating the series of cases including the twelve children in the Lancet paper and you stated that all patients reviewed so far had come through General Practitioners or paediatricians by “the standard route”

— a statement that the GMC found once again to be “dishonest”, “irresponsible” and “contrary to your duty to ensure that the information provided by you was accurate”:

The Panel has taken into account that this was an important scientific meeting to consider the implications of your published research and the major public health implications arising from it. The Panel has found that your responses to the questions raised at this meeting were inaccurate.

The Panel is satisfied that you knew that your response to the questions was factually wrong. The statement you made would be considered by ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people to be dishonest. The Panel is satisfied that your conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.[12]

Conflicts of Interest at the Root of Matters

The report also found several undisclosed conflicts of interest:

4) Involvement in MMR litigation: Starting in 1996— two years before the Lancet article — Wakefield was

a) involved in advising Richard Barr, a solicitor acting for persons alleged to have suffered harm caused by the administration of the MMR vaccine, as to the research that would be required to establish that the vaccine was causing injury

b) Mr Barr had the benefit of public funding from the Legal Aid Board in relation to the pursuit of litigation against manufacturers of the MMR vaccine (“the MMR litigation”)

c) [Wakefield] provided Mr Barr with,

i) costing proposals for a research study . . .

ii) a protocol, giving details of the research study . . .

d) On 22 August 1996 the Legal Aid Board agreed to provide a maximum cost of £55,000 to fund the items in the Costing Proposal . . .

e) The Legal Aid Board provided funding in two instalments of £25,000, in late 1996 and in 1999 respectively . . . [13]

But that is not all: in December 2006 journalist Brian Deer learned, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, that the Legal Services Commission (formerly Legal Aid Board) had paid Wakefield the staggering sum of £435,643 fees plus £3,910 expenses as an “expert” in the MMR litigation.[14]

Following the Patent Money

5) Patent applications: On 5 June 1997 — more than eight months before the Lancet article was published — Wakefield filed a patent application for a new measles vaccine to replace the standard MMR vaccine, asserting that this would avoid the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and regressive behavioural disease (RBD, i.e. autism) that is, according to the application, associated with MMR vaccination.[15] A revised application was filed on 4 June 1998, three months after the Lancet paper; it stated inter alia that

It has now also been shown that use of the MMR vaccine . . . results in ileal lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, chronic colitis and pervasive developmental disorder including autism (RBD), in some infants.[16]

— and this despite the unambiguous admission in the Lancet paper that

We did not prove an association between measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.[17]

It is telling that at the press conference announcing the Lancet article, as well as in many subsequent forums, Wakefield forcefully advocated single measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations, spaced 12 months apart, in place of the combined MMR vaccine.[18]

Wakefield’s lucrative involvement in the MMR litigation and his patent application represented glaring conflicts of interest, which he did not disclose to the Editor of the Lancet or to the Ethics Committee at the Royal Free Hospital, and which were only revealed publicly many years later, by investigative journalist Brian Deer.[19]

In short, items 1–3 above constitute clear instances of scientific fraud;[20] items 4–5 constitute gross and undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the two transgressions clearly work in tandem.

Finally, the GMC report also found Wakefield guilty of several other ethical violations, including invasive procedures (such as lumbar puncture) on child patients that were not clinically indicated.[21]

Four months after this report, the GMC weighed the entire case: it determined that any single one of several proved allegations — most notably the failure to disclose conflicts of interest, and the breach of ethical constraints on research — constituted, in and of itself, Serious Professional Misconduct.[22] Combining the many serious violations, the GMC concluded that no sanction short of de-registration would be

sufficient or appropriate against a background of several aggravating factors and in the absence of any mitigating submissions made on [Wakefield’s] behalf. Dr Wakefield’s continued lack of insight as to his misconduct serve [sic] only to satisfy the Panel that suspension is not sufficient and that his actions are incompatible with his continued registration as a medical practitioner.[23]

Substantiating Fraud Among Many Violations

In conclusion: it is not quite correct to say that Wakefield lost his medical licence due to scientific fraud. Rather, he lost his medical licence due to a long series of serious ethical transgressions that included, among other things, scientific fraud.

The scientific fraud seems, in fact, to have loomed smallest in the GMC’s reckoning of Wakefield’s misdeeds,[24] but in the long run it will surely be the gravest: if the scare that Wakefield started, and that he continues to abet, causes even a 5% increase in measles incidence worldwide[25]— an extremely modest scenario — it will be responsible for more than 50,000 avoidable child deaths in the coming decade alone.[26]

I wish to thank Brian Martin for giving me permission to quote from his now-superseded preliminary draft, as well as for helpful comments on my own draft.

Contact details: sokal@nyu.edu

References

Bednarczyk, Robert A. et al. 2019. Current landscape of nonmedical vaccination exemptions in the United States: Impact of policy changes. Expert Review of Vaccines 18(2): 175–190.

Boseley, Sarah. 1998a. Alert over child jabs. The Guardian, 27 February, p. 1.

Boseley, Sarah. 1998b. MMR vaccination fears ‘not justified’: No evidence of link to autism or bowel disease, scientists say. The Guardian, 25 March, p. 3.

Bower, Hilary. 1998. Link with bowel disease fuels controversy over vaccine. British Medical Journal 316: 723 (7 March).

Bradford, W. David and Mandich, Anne. 2015. Some state vaccination laws contribute to greater exemption rates and disease Outbreaks in the United States. Health Affairs 34(8): 1383–1390.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2015. Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine Preventable Diseases, 13th edition. Washington, D.C.: Public Health Foundation. Chapter 13: Measles. Available on-line at http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html

Deer, Brian. n.d. #1. Royal Free MMR video news release, 1998. Available on-line at http://briandeer.com/wakefield/royal-video.htm

Deer, Brian. n.d. #2. Andrew Wakefield’s vaccine patent. Available on-line at http://briandeer.com/wakefield/vaccine-patent.htm

Deer, Brian. n.d. #3. Secret payments to MMR Wakefield. Available on-line at http://briandeer.com/wakefield/legal-aid.htm

Deer, Brian. 2012. Amended declaration of Brian Deer in support of defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss. In the District Court of Travis County, Texas, 250^th Judicial District. Dated 9 July 2012. Available on-line at http://briandeer.com/solved/slapp-amended-declaration.pdf

General Medical Council (U.K.). 2010a. Fitness to practise panel hearing, 28 January 2010. Available on-line at http://briandeer.com/solved/gmc-charge-sheet. pdf

General Medical Council (U.K.). 2010b. Dr Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, Determination on Serious Professional Misconduct (SPM) and sanction, 24 May 2010.Available on-line at http://web.archive.org/web/20110809092833/http://www.gmc-uk.org/Wakefield_SPM_and_SANCTION.pdf_32595267.pdf

Intellectual Property Office (U.K.). 1997. Pharmaceutical composition for treatment of ibd and rbd. Patent application GB9711663.6, 5 June 1997. Available on-line at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum/Case/ApplicationNumber/GB9711663.6

Katkin, Kenneth. 2003. Scientific fraud. In: Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., edited by Stanley I. Kutler, vol. 7, pp. 277–279. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Available on-line at http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3401803766/GVRL?u=new64731&sid=GVRL&xid=a44f927 and http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/scientific-fraud

Lo, Nathan C. and Hotez, Peter J. 2017. Public health and economic consequences of vaccine hesitancy for measles in the United States. JAMA Pediatrics 171(9): 887–892.

Martin, Brian. 1992. Scientific fraud and the power structure of science. Prometheus 10: 83–98. Available on-line at http://www.uow.edu.au/~/bmartin/pubs/92prom.html

Martin, Brian. 2019. Bad social science. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 3: 6–16. Available on-line at https://social-epistemology.com/2019/03/05/bad-social-science-brian-martin/

McNeil, Donald G., Jr. 2019. Measles surges past 700th case in U.S. outbreak.

New York Times, April 29, page A1. Available on-line at http://www.nytimes.com/

2019/04/29/health/measles-outbreak-cdc.html

Murray, Ian. 1998a. Health chief defends triple vaccine. The Times [London],13 March, p. 10.

Murray, Ian. 1998b. Triple baby vaccine is safe, experts tell parents. The Times [London], 25 March, p. 11.

Phadke, Varun H. et al. 2016. Association between vaccine refusal and vaccine- preventable diseases in the United States: A review of measles and pertussis. Journal of the American Medical Association 315(11): 1149–1158.

Sokal, Alan. 1996. Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text #46/47 (Spring/Summer): 217–252. Available on-line at http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/#transgress [Reprinted with annotations in Sokal 2008, chapter 1.] Sokal, Alan. 1998. What the Social Text affair does and does not prove. In: A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, edited by Noretta Koertge, pp. 9–22. New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available on-line at http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/#noretta [Reprinted in slightly condensed form in Sokal 2008, chapter 5.]

Sokal, Alan. 2008. Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. Oxford– New York: Oxford University Press.

Wakefield, Andrew. 1998. Author’s reply. The Lancet 351: 1356 (2 May).

Wakefield, Andrew. 2003. Regressive behavioral disorder diagnosis. United States Patent US 6,534,259 B1. Filed March 23, 2000; granted March 18, 2003; normal expiration date June 4, 2018; expired March 18, 2011 due to non-payment of maintenance fees. Available on-line at http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

Wakefield, Andrew Jeremy and Fundenberg [sic], Hugh. 1998. UK Patent Application GB 2 325 856 A, filed 4 June 1998, published 9 December 1998. Available on-line at http://briandeer.com/mmr/1998-vaccine-patent.pdf

Wakefield, A.J., Murch, S.H., Anthony, A. et al. 1998. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet 351: 637–641 (28 February). Retraction: The Lancet 375: 445 (2010).

World Health Organization. 2018. Progress towards regional measles elimination – worldwide, 2000–2017. Weekly Epidemiological Record 93: 649–660 (30 November). Available on-line at https://www.who.int/wer/2018/wer9348/en/

[1] Sokal (1998, p. 11).

[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015, p. 211).

[3] McNeil (2019). See also Bradford and Mandich (2015), Phadke et al. (2016), Lo and Hotez (2017) and Bednarczyk et al. (2019) for related statistical information concerning the public-health consequences of non-medical exemptions to immunization.

[4] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles, where references to the original sources can be found.

[5] World Health Organization (2018, p. 656; see also p. 657, Figure 1 for a graph with error bars).

It is only fair to observe that the error bars (95% confidence limits) are fairly large; the actual

number of avoided deaths could be as small as 14 million or as large as 28 million.

[6] That is, all cases in which the Panel felt there existed reasonable doubt were labeled “found not proved” and were considered to be resolved in favor of Dr. Wakefield. General Medical Council (2010a, p. 2).

[7] General Medical Council (2010a, p. 45, item 33).

[8] General Medical Council (2010a, pp. 44–46, items 32–34).

[9] Wakefield (1998).

[10] General Medical Council (2010a, p. 47, item 35).

[11] Wakefield (1998).

[12] General Medical Council (2010a, pp. 47–48, item 36).

[13] General Medical Council (2010a, pp. 4–6, items 3 and 4).

[14] Deer (n.d. #3). For reasons unknown to me, the GMC report does not mention these latter payments.

[15] Intellectual Property Office (1997); Deer (n.d. #2); General Medical Council (2010a, p. 49, item 38).

[16] Wakefield and Fundenberg (1998, pp. 1–2). See also similar statements on pp. 3–4. Two years later, Wakefield filed a companion patent application in the USA, with almost identical text. This latter patent was granted in 2003, but — curiously — covering only “a method for the diagnosis of Regressive Behavioral Disease”, not the vaccine (Wakefield 2003). Since the dossier at the U.S. Patent Office website shows a “non-final rejection” on September 28, 2001 and a “final rejection” on July 1, 2002, followed by a final “notice of allowance” on October 22, 2002, my guess —which would require further investigation to check — is that the claims for the vaccine were rejected, but then, after correspondence with Wakefield’s lawyers, revised claims for the diagnosis method were allowed.

[17] Wakefield et al. (1998, p. 641).

[18] Boseley (1998a); Deer (n.d. #1); Bower (1998); Murray (1998a). It should be noted that single vaccinations carry dangers of their own: as Sir Kenneth Calman, U.K. Chief Medical Officer, pointed out, “Giving the vaccinations separately would mean three visits and three injections. For a minimum of two years a child would not be immunised against a disease which could kill or maim. I am not prepared to encourage something which might harm children.” (Murray 1998b; see also Boseley 1998b).

[19] General Medical Council (2010a, pp. 7–11, items 5–7 and pp. 49–50, item 39). See also Deer (2012) for an informative chronology.

[20] The term “scientific fraud” does not appear to have any universally accepted definition, but it is generally understood to mean something like “intentional misrepresentation of the methods, procedures, or results of scientific research” (Katkin 2003, p. 277). The related term “research misconduct” is formally defined by the U.S. government to mean “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism”, where “falsification” is defined as “manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” (42 CFR 93.103 and 45 CFR 689.1). For what it’s worth, Martin (1992) criticizes this definition of scientific fraud as overly narrow.

[21] General Medical Council (2010a, pp. 11–42, items 8–29 and pp. 50–55, items 40–42). Some of these allegations were “found proved” and others were “found not proved”.

[22] Strangely, while the misleading statements in the Lancet article and subsequent forums were repeatedly called “dishonest” and “irresponsible”, the GMC final report did not single them out as constituting Serious Professional Misconduct in their own right (General Medical Council 2010b, pp. 4–5). Perhaps this is because the GMC is a medical council and is therefore most concerned with medical ethics in the narrow sense, i.e. the protection of the welfare of doctors’ patients.

[23] General Medical Council (2010b, p. 9).

[24] See footnote 22 above.

[25] Compared to what it would have been without the scare.

[26] This is based on the current (2017) figure of approximately 110,000 measles deaths per year (World Health Organization 2018, p. 656).

Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints (Part Two), Michel Croce

SERRC — May 21, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Michel Croce, University of Edinburgh, michel.croce@ed.ac.uk.

Croce, Michel. “Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 25-35.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. This essay is published in two separate posts, the first of which is available at this link. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-49a

Pictured here, an artist’s rendering of Christian Quast and his uncle who can do plumbing. Some liberties in representation have been taken.
Image by Natalie Bowers via Flickr / Creative Commons

. . . . In a word, Quast cannot have his cake and eat it too.

On the Fundamental Ingredients of Expertise

The balanced account suffers from a second problem pertaining to the aforementioned ingredients of expertise, namely primary competence, secondary competence, and intellectual virtues (see also Hardwig 1994, 92). According to Expert_F-C-M, expertise requires an undefeated disposition to fulfill a particular service function adequately at the moment of assessment.

In turn, all three ingredients feature in the undefeated-disposition requirement, in that lacking any of them defeats the attribution of expertise. In this section, I demonstrate that this account is too strong, as it poses unduly restrictive requirements for one to be an expert. In particular, I worry about secondary competence and what Quast calls “intellectually virtuous character” as necessary components of expertise.

Let us consider secondary, or explanatory, competence first: the ability to give an account of one’s performances. We have already seen that on the balanced account, failing to display secondary competence defeats expertise because, as the wine-consultant case shows, we expect from experts that they can give us explanations regarding their services.

However, the plausibility of this understanding of expertise entirely rests on the specifics of the example Quast introduces. In the proposed case, a subject challenges the wine consultant’s evaluation because of its inconsistency with the subject’s expectations and the testimony of the former owner of the cellar. Notice, though, that the disposition to account for one’s performances—in particular, to laypeople—requires an entirely different set of abilities than the ones necessary to fulfill one’s service function successfully. The former set includes such intellectual virtues as a sensitivity to a layperson’s epistemic resources, communicative clarity, intellectual generosity, and possibly other abilities.[1]

A civil engineer could well possess primary competence in demolishing or rebuilding a bridge and the ability to discuss it with other experts yet lack the competence to provide effective explanations of their techniques, strategies, and related risks to a lay audience. Something similar happens in sports. A lot of amazing athletes can do extremely complicated things that are generally out of reach for most human beings, yet they may not be able properly to account for what they do.

They can show you these actions hundreds of times, but if you ask them to tell you how they do that, you might feel extremely disappointed or confused by their explanations. This is why not all the greatest sport heroes are good coaches and not all the best civil engineers can effectively account for what they do to a lay audience. For as I will stress in the final section, primary competence and secondary competence are, in a sense, different kinds of expertise.

A Private or People’s Expertise

The required combination of these competences for a proper understanding of expertise on Quast’s view is somewhat surprising if we bear in mind that he wants to confer objective expertise to “private experts,” who can offer us quite specific services such as fixing some leaky drain pipes. In Quast’s private-expert case, it seems odd to require that Christian’s father-in-law be able to give an account of how he is going to fix the pipe in order to fulfill the function of a private expert.

For, on the one hand, the relevant contrast class includes two individuals, namely Christian and his wife, who—as we are told—are both inexperienced in these kinds of handicraft matters. On the other, Christian’s father-in-law might even lack the necessary abilities properly to explain how he will repair the pipes.

These considerations make it hard to see why giving an appropriate account of the provided service should be necessary for Christian’s father-in-law to be an expert on a functionalist view that aims at being in a position to grant private experts objective expertise.

Consider now the other ingredient of expertise on Quast’s view, namely one’s intellectual character in the sense of their willingness to manifest primary and secondary competence when appropriate. The above considerations about the intellectual abilities required for one to deliver proper explanations of one’s service should provide sufficient reason to consider possession of an intellectually virtuous character as a relevant component of the competences required for one to be an expert rather than as mere willingness to manifest such competences.[2] Thus, in the remainder of this critical notice I shall simply tackle the willingness component and, in particular, the willingness to manifest secondary competence when appropriate.

Suppose a physicist, call him Ivory Tower, is completely reluctant to share anything related to his work with people, especially laypersons. Ivory’s social interactions are limited to what’s required for him to keep his position at his institution. Ivory works in optics, and, in particular, he is developing reliable ways to see through walls by using special cameras. More specifically, he is working on a project that would allow rescue teams to individuate people when the terrain is dangerous and would allow cars to avoid accidents by identifying obstacles or vehicles from around the corner.

Quast’s view commits us to conclude that Ivory lacks expertise in optics or whatever more specific subfield he is working in because he fails to display the required willingness to give an account of his performances when appropriate. This verdict is unsatisfying in general, as it strikes us as evident that Ivory’s extremely sophisticated work in optics should suffice to grant him the status of an expert.

Furthermore, the verdict is unsatisfying even from the perspective of a functionalist account of expertise, as Quast’s purports to be. For despite lacking willingness to explain his work to others, Ivory is surely serving laypeople’s needs. He does so by attempting to solve problems in optics and providing the community with new resources rather than by making himself accountable for his work to a lay audience, but this merely amounts to another relevant way an expert can serve their community, as I will argue in the next section. Thus, since there seem to be no good reasons to deny Ivory the expertise he has acquired through years of intense work, we can conclude that the willingness to manifest secondary competence is not a necessary condition for one to possess expertise.

Two allegedly key ingredients in Quast’s account of expertise, namely secondary competence and the willingness to manifest that competence when appropriate, are less fundamental than one might have initially thought. In fact, they should not be considered necessary requirements for one to be an expert in some domain. In the final section, I shall explore some implications of the considerations offered so far, with the aim of contributing to reaching a better understanding of the notion of, and the role of, an expert in the context of the society we currently live in.

Expertise Today: Toward an Objective Approach

Many reputable scholars characterize the age we live in as a post-truth era (Fuller 2018) in which the very idea of expertise is dead (Nichols 2017), as it has been replaced by a free market in information and self-attributed competences that takes place in the blogosphere (Coady 2012), the internet (Lynch 2016), and more recently social media, where fake news easily proliferates (Vosoughi et al. 2018). As Nichols thoroughly describes (see §7), we’re surrounded by a gigantic amount of news and by experts who are more and more specialized in any domain, and yet we know less than before and distrust expertise.

If there is one thing epistemologists can surely do—in fact, must do—to counteract the advance of post-truth thinking in our society, it is attempting to reach a better understanding of the notion of expertise. Such a service would not solve all the problems, yet it would at least contribute to indicating where genuine competence lies and who has it and therefore to marking a neater distinction between experts and charlatans. This is why I am largely sympathetic to Quast’s efforts, as it is clear that we need experts now more than ever.

It is for the same reasons, though, that I believe Quast’s balanced account of expertise is on the wrong track. In this final section, I make two points to suggest how we should redirect our search for a better account of expertise. First, I explain why we need a more objective account of expertise. Second, I suggest an alternative way to look at the service experts are supposed to fulfill in our communities.

The first consideration is called for by the peculiar situation we’re currently in. As I showed in §1, the functionalist spirit of the balanced account of expertise ends up undermining the very notion of objective expertise that Goldman has in mind when he argues that “being an expert is not simply a matter of veritistic superiority to most of the community. Some non-comparative threshold of veritistic attainment must be reached” (2001, 91).

Since Goldman admits that it might be difficult to determine where the bar has to be set, one might suspect the balanced account has a clear advantage over a purely objective approach to expertise, as on Quast’s view being suitably disposed and willing to serve the need of a relevant contrast class is all it takes for one to achieve the status of an expert.

This is a mistake though because it is far from obvious that a novice or group of novices can reliably ascribe expertise to someone who is supposed to be more competent than they are in a domain. In other words, the more context sensitive and subject sensitive is the process of expertise attribution, the higher is the risk of misplacing trust in non-experts. This is an unwelcome consequence of the balanced account—a consequence that makes the account lose its alleged positional advantage over objective approaches to expertise.

Against the Balanced Account

My proposed epistemic consideration against the balanced account of expertise can be supported by a further reason for favoring an objective account of expertise—namely, the fact that this latter account provides a community with robust criteria for assessing who is to be trusted to deliver a service in any field. This translates into a practical advantage for the entire community, which can create ways to signal who and where experts are[3] and therefore help lay members navigate the current ocean of self-attributed competences and epistemic egalitarian ideals. Needless to say, this consideration does not suffice as a remedy against the detrimental effects of post-truth thinking; yet it should at least offer motivation for directing our efforts toward an objective approach to expertise rather than a “balanced” one.

The second consideration brings the distinction between primary and secondary competence back on stage. In a realist, or objective, approach, the attribution of expertise cannot depend on the specific function one is required to fulfill relative to some contrast class in a particular context. Some handy craftsperson who has learned how to repair the very same leaky drain pipe at one’s home over the years does not count as an expert, because their competence is too limited and unreliable in similar situations in which a proficient plumber is expected to succeed.

Yet, an objective account is in a position to distinguish at least two broad kinds of expertise, namely the expertise of those who can reliably provide some sort of service in a domain and those who can explain what’s going on in a domain to others, especially laypeople. Call the former domain-oriented expertise and the latter novice-oriented expertise.

The set of domain-oriented experts includes reliable plumbers, scuba divers, wine tasters, lawyers, doctors, musicians, and scholars, among others. Their expertise consists of an ability to serve the needs of a community in their respective domains—that is, what Quast calls primary competence. In particular, the function of domain-oriented experts encompasses two main roles:

(i) that of expert practitioners, who address specific needs of the community members—for example, repairing leaky drain pipes, maintaining or restoring health, and performing jazz music; and

(ii) that of expert innovators, whose job is to improve the community’s capacity to serve the needs of their members by developing new resources, advancing the techniques, or carrying out groundbreaking research in a domain—for example, creating more-robust drain pipes, developing new therapies against cancer, or composing jazz music.

As should be evident, both functions demand that the subject have intellectual or practical dispositions to reliably deliver the required services. However, these roles are quite different, and not all expert practitioners are also expert innovators, and vice versa. Thus, any individual who fulfills either role possesses domain-oriented expertise.

In contrast, the set of novice-oriented experts includes those individuals who have secondary competence, namely the capacity to help laypeople understand the services domain-oriented experts provide to the community. This set typically includes teachers and science popularizers, but all domain-oriented experts who possess a sufficient amount of secondary competence may have novice-oriented expertise too.

However, possessing domain-oriented expertise does not ensure that one also has novice-oriented expertise, as the wine-consultant and civil-engineer cases discussed in §2 demonstrate. For this service activates a different set of dispositions—namely, novice-oriented abilities, which are not strictly necessary for one to possess domain-oriented expertise.

Conclusion

The proposed categorization of the two main services experts fulfill in a community allows us to take into due consideration the functionalist element of expertise without giving up on an objective perspective that grants conceptual primacy to the dispositional component of expertise. We all wish to be surrounded by subjects who can offer clear explanations of how they are going to satisfy our needs, but we’d better also have an account that explains why some experts greatly serve the domain-oriented needs of our community without being able to serve the novice-oriented ones.

This is not only important for us to improve the explanatory power of our definition of expertise, but also for a community to evaluate how to deploy its resources to ensure that both kinds of experts are in a suitable position to fulfill their respective service function.

This reply to Quast’s insightful paper aimed at shedding light on some limits of his account and sketching a strategy to accept Quast’s suggestions about the necessary balance between a dispositional dimension and a functionalist dimension of expertise within an objective approach. Far from offering a comprehensive alternative account, I hope this reply can encourage others to address the important issues Quast has raised in his paper and can contribute to improving our understanding of the notion of expertise.

Contact details: michel.croce@ed.ac.uk

References

Coady, David. 2012. What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues. Malden (MA): Wiley-Blackwell.

Croce, Michel. 2019. “On What It Takes to Be An Expert.” The Philosophical Quarterly 69(274): 1-21.

Fuller, Steve. Post-Truth: Knowledge as A Power Game. London: Anthem Press.

Goldman, Alvin. 2001. “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63: 85-110.

Lynch, Michael. 2016. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in The Age of Big Data. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Nichols, Tom. 2017. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press.

Quast, Christian. 2018. “Towards A Balanced Account of Expertise.” Social Epistemology 32(6): 397-419.

Vosoughi, Soroush; Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. (2018). “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science 359 (6380): 1146-1151.

[1] These virtues are part of what I have elsewhere called novice-oriented abilities (see Croce 2019, 13).

[2] For the sake of completeness, it should also be noted that other intellectual virtues may be required for one to possess primary competence in a domain, especially in those fields in which competence involves some propositional knowledge and understanding. In particular, I have in mind virtues such as thoroughness, intellectual perseverance, creativity, open-mindedness, intellectual curiosity, and autonomy (see Croce 2019, 18).

[3] As Goldman points out, this is the role of academic certifications, professional accreditations, work experiences, and so on (2001, 97).

Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints (Part One), Michel Croce

SERRC — May 16, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Michel Croce, University of Edinburgh, michel.croce@ed.ac.uk.

Croce, Michel. “Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 25-35.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. This essay is published in two separate posts, the second of which is available at this link. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-496

Image by Bill Kerr via Flickr / Creative Commons

Christian Quast has recently embarked on the project of systematizing the debate about the notion of expertise, an extremely fascinating and important issue addressed by scholars of many disciplines yet still in need of an interdisciplinary take. He sheds light on a number of relevant features of this notion and defends what he calls a “balanced” account of expertise, namely one that defines this concept in light of an expert’s dispositions, manifestations of their dispositions, and social role or function.

In doing so, Quast argues against three versions of reductionism about expertise: Reductionism_F, which reduces expertise to the function an expert fulfills in a community; Reductionism_M, which confuses expertise with the manifestation of an expert’s competence; and Reductionism_D, in which expertise boils down to possessing suitable dispositions in a specific domain—that is, practical abilities or epistemic properties such as knowledge, true beliefs, or understanding.

As an attempt at bringing together interdisciplinary discussions of a specific topic, Quast’s project is ambitious and provides a genuine contribution to the ongoing discussions around the topic of expertise in philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. Inevitably, Quast’s rich analysis and original proposal raise a number of worries that deserve to be further inspected.

In this critical reply, I offer some considerations that put pressure on Quast’s balanced account and hopefully help anyone interested in this debate take a step forward toward explaining what it takes for one to be an expert. The reply is structured as follows. First, I argue that his allegedly balanced view is liable to a potentially compromising tension between its function component and the ingredients of objective expertise (§1).

Then, I show that Quast’s threefold characterization of an objective expert is too strong, as it imposes conditions that several individuals whom we would consider experts are unable to fulfill (§2). Finally, I provide reasons in favor of endorsing an objective account of expertise in light of some specific features of our society, and show how this account can take into due consideration the different services experts ordinarily perform (§3).

Against a Balanced Account of Expertise

The first consideration I want to offer in response to Quast is that, to put it simply, he cannot have his cake and eat it too. Quast devotes a good amount of his paper to convincing us that the aforementioned reductionist accounts of expertise are flawed and that a more plausible story of what it takes for one to be an expert has to rely upon “an entangled interrelationship” between an expert’s dispositions and the contextual service function they perform in a community (2019, 412). In this section, I purport to show that such an entangled relationship of dispositions and functions on his balanced approach is largely problematic.

Let us recall Quast’s comprehensive definition of an expert, which is offered right at the end of his article:

(Expert_F-C-M) Someone e is an objective expert in contrast to some client c within a certain domain d only if e is undefeatedly disposed to fulfill a particular service function in d for c adequately at the moment of assessment (412).

At first glance, Quast’s move is attractive. In the end, we usually think of experts as subjects who are more competent than most people in a domain,[1] but, at the same time, we grant one the status of an expert (i) based on their social role and (ii) against a relevant contrast class of individuals who are unable to provide a similar service. In contrast, both Reductionism_F and Reductionism_D are liable to counterexamples.

The former is wrongly committed to granting the status of an expert translator to a subject who manages a translation-services company by delegating any job to unknown freelancers and lacks any translating skills (402). The latter is wrongly committed to grant the status of a wine expert to an individual who can correctly estimate the value of a wine cellar without having the ability or the willingness to provide an explanation of their evaluation (407).

In contrast, neither the manager nor the wine consultant satisfies the requirements of expertise on the balanced account. The former is not an expert, because he lacks the dispositions required to provide translating services—that is, knowledge of at least two languages, translating skills, and the like. The latter is not an expert, because her competence to assess the value of wine cellars gets defeated by her inability or unwillingness to give an account of her services at the moment of assessment (407).[2]

Dispositions and Functions in Tension

However, a closer inspection of Quast’s proposed view of expertise reveals a tension between the disposition component and the function component. Consider the disposition component first and, in particular, his analysis of objective expertise.

He conceives of objective expertise as encompassing the following three elements: (i) primary competence, which relates to an expert’s reliability in delivering the services they are supposed to provide; (ii) secondary competence, which relates to an expert’s ability to explain their services to a client, thereby establishing and fostering mutual trust; and (iii) intellectually virtuous character, which ensures that an expert is willing to manifest both the above competences when appropriate.

For the time being, let’s set aside a reasonable concern one might have about Quast’s unduly narrow characterization of the role intellectual-character virtues play in his account of objective expertise.[3]

The balanced account is quite demanding, as according to it someone is an objective expert insofar as they are competent in a given domain, able to provide their clients with tailored explanations of their services, and willing to do so in the appropriate circumstances. Going back to the wine-consultant case, it should be evident that the reason why the consultant might fail to be an expert is that she lacks secondary competence, intellectual virtues, or both, as her inability or unwillingness to share any considerations about her estimate of the wine cellar with the client demonstrates.

As anticipated, on the balanced account these considerations about objective expertise need to be balanced, or implemented, with further remarks on the service function of experts. Here Quast takes quite a concessive route and offers the case of a “private expert”: in the example, Christian Quast’s wife asks him to find someone who can fix or replace a leaky drain pipe; he approaches the issue by relying on his father-in-law, whose craft hobby enables him to solve the problem (410).

Quast is ready to admit that his father-in-law is more of an expert than himself and his wife, yet he goes so far as to concede that the man satisfies the requirements of a function-based account of expertise.

The function component plays a key role in this account, in that the service his father-in-law fulfills determines

(i) a relevant contrast class of individuals who lack the disposition to perform a specific function—that is, the class composed of Christian and his wife;

(ii) a proper characterization of the domain of expertise, namely that of replacing leaky drain pipes;

(iii) the degree of reliability required for Christian’s father-in-law to fulfill the function—that is, Christian’s own standards for replacement of leaky drain pipes;

(iv) a range of similar situations in which the man is supposed to be able to deliver his services; and

(v) minimum conditions for him to fulfill the individual requirements of objective expertise, which in this case require relative competence to repair the leaky drain pipe at the Quasts’ place.

Thus, on Quast’s balanced account, possession of expertise depends on contextual factors, such as the specifics of the contrast class of laypeople and the situation in which expertise is ascribed, as well as on practical factors, such as the needs of the relevant clients and the urgency of the required service. These elements determine whether a hobbyist-craftsperson is an expert in repairing leaky drain pipes or a wine consultant is an expert in value assessment of wine cellars.

Problems of Balance in Expertise

Unfortunately, the “balanced” account emerging from these components is less tenable than one might have initially thought. The first problem is that it is hard to make sense of the notion of objective expertise on such a functionalist account. For possession of objective expertise in a domain becomes hostage to two inherently relative elements, namely (i) the service someone is disposed and willing to fulfill for (ii) a community—or contrast class, to stick with Quast’s vocabulary.

On standard comparative accounts of expertise, (ii) obviously plays a major role, as possession of expertise merely amounts to being more of an expert in a (broader or narrower) domain than some group of people and therefore expertise reduces to an entirely comparative notion.

In such a perspective, both Christian’s father-in-law and a plumbing engineer are experts in repairing leaky drain pipes although the latter’s competence is much broader than the former’s. For each of them is more of an expert than the respective contrast class, which includes Christian and his wife in the former case versus, say, most people in the engineer’s town, district, or state in the latter case. Clearly, though, this diagnosis comes at the cost of giving up on the inquiry into the objective requirements of expertise.

Despite including (ii) in his account of expertise, Quast purports to endorse a view that makes room for objective expertise. Thus, he has to prevent this relative condition from delivering the standard comparative diagnosis in situations such as the leaky-drain-pipes one.

He does so through the service-function element—that is, (i)—by arguing that one is an objective expert insofar as they are undefeatedly disposed to serve a relevant need of the respective community or contrast class. Thus, on the balanced account we can still attribute objective expertise to both Christian’s father-in-law and a plumbing engineer as long as they can fix leaky drain pipes in the respective community or contrast class.

I am unpersuaded by this move for two reasons. The first is that introducing a relative element such as (i) does not neutralize the anti-objective effect of (ii); rather, it is likely to intensify such an effect by adding a further relative variable to the account. The second is that the only way for Quast to grant expertise to his father-in-law and a plumbing engineer is to impose odd restrictions on domains of expertise.

Specifically, he has to concede that his father-in-law is an expert because he serves the community composed of Christian and his wife by doing something like “repairing leaky drain pipes at the Quasts’ place” or “repairing leaky drain pipes of some kind.” In contrast, the plumbing engineer is an expert because he serves a wider community by, say, “repairing leaky drain pipes of any kind.”

This move would thus generate an unnecessary proliferation of domains of expertise depending on the specific needs of any relevant contrast class. For example, my auntie Renata, who helps most inhabitants of a rural village in Liguria react to (i.e., “like”) and comment on the content appearing in their Facebook news feed, would possess objective expertise in something like “adding likes and comments on posts on Facebook” relative to the contrast class composed of the citizens of Bevena, although her competence regarding social networks ends pretty much there.

These considerations show that the balanced account narrows the notion of expertise to the point that we lose our grip on what is objective about an expert’s competence. To avoid this result and save both the functionalist spirit of his view and its context sensitivity, Quast should abandon the idea of making room for objective expertise and endorse an entirely comparative account. This is why, in a word, Quast cannot have his cake and eat it too.