Science, Expertise, and Society

It was fortunate for Charles de Bois-Valé, lawyer and natural philosopher, that he had an
ingenious legal team. In May of 1780, he had affixed a lightning rod to his house to protect his community—the small French town of Saint-Omer—from thunderbolts. Unimpressed by the amateur physicien, Vissery’s neighbors sued him on the grounds that the rod might be dangerous. Vissery’s lawyer argued that judges could not force Viessery to take down his lightning rod unless the proper experts, accredited physicians, deemed it unsafe, and he hired legal whiz kid Maximilien Robespierre to make the oral argument. Robespierre, however, reversed his boss’s position on the necessity of experts. Drawing on Rousseau, Robespierre argued that judges were perfectly capable of determining the safety of the lightning rod without knowledge of electrical phenomena; like all human beings, they possessed an innate ability to understand brute facts about nature. A decade later, as deputy of the National Convention, Robespierre imposed his distrust of expertise upon the new Republic: “All academies and literary societies established or endowed by the nation are eliminated.
The story of Vissery in eighteenth-century France points to perennial and global questions about
the phenomenon of “scientific expertise.” In a historical register, how have sciences, expertise,
and the state been co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing? How have (and how do) practices of
quantification and categorization contribute to colonial expansion and reification of racial
hierarchies? Philosophically, how can we assess “good judgment” within scientific practices?
Can such assessments be articulated and generalized to domains “outside the lab,” or are they
inevitably “tacit” and context-specific? From a theological perspective, what are the tensions and
synergies between scientific and religious epistemologies and authorities?
These questions invite historical, local, and discipline-specific answers to these questions. We are
seeking to bring together a variety of perspectives on the topic of scientific expertise in society in
the hopes of bringing mutual illumination and clarity—perhaps even beyond the walls of the
academy.

To this end, the conference will feature keynote presentations from Dr. Mark Harris
(Theology, University of Oxford), Dr. Mitra Sharafi (Legal History, University of Wisconsin,
Madison), Dr. Katharina Nieswandt (Philosophy, Concordia University), and Dr. Harry Collins
(Sociology of Science, Cardiff University).

We are currently accepting submissions for twenty-minute papers and for posters.
Abstracts should be approximately 500 words for papers and 100 for posters. A limited
number of travel bursaries available.