JBS Haldane Lecture

Heather Douglas:

How the Public Can Assess Expertise

On Wednesday 13th December at 5pm in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building, Professor Heather Douglas will present a JBS Haldane Lecture , on "How the Public Can Assess Expertise". As with all Haldane lectures, the talk is open to the public.

Abstract:

Although general trust in expertise remains relatively high, trust in specific expertise has seen drops for some publics.  More worrisome, the relationship between experts and the public in democratic societies remains fraught.  Expertise is not something that any of us can gain in all the areas where we need to make decisions, and we still need experts to help inform our decisions.  Yet, straightforward reliance on experts is made complicated by experts whose work is not readily assessable in the short term and by the normal state of disagreement among experts.  Such complications are exacerbated by failures of expertise, both historical and contemporary.  In this talk, I will describe how the public can plausibly assess expertise, even cases of genuine expert disagreement, without demanding that they become experts themselves.  These bases for assessing expertise serve ultimately as bases for trust in expertise.

Biography:

Heather Douglas is the Waterloo Chair in Science and Society in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She received her Ph.D. from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, and earned her B.A. in Philosophy and Physics at the University of Delaware in 1991.

Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation; she was recently a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Her book, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, was published in 2009 by University of Pittsburgh Press.

She has served on the Governing Board of the Philosophy of Science Association, the steering committee of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, and the Section L committee for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Waterloo, she was the Phibbs Assistant Professor of Science and Ethics at the University of Puget Sound (1998-2004), Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee (2004-2011), and Visiting Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2011).

Her work focuses on the interface between science and policy, with particular attention to the role of values in science, the nature of scientific integrity, the relationship between citizens and experts in democracies, and the norms that should govern the weighing of complex sets of evidence for use in policy-making.