In considering this work's various suggestions of how policy analysis might change under the influence of a non-binary approach, a reader might legitimately fear that the approach would enhance the already great power of experts and unelected officials. The claim, for example, that the public servant need not accept the elected official's normative views as givens can spark nervousness. We must thus address the problem of experts and expertise.

In this discussion, I will define expertise broadly, as usable knowledge that requires time and effort to acquire. I do not assume that it need be ‘objective’, however that is understood, nor ‘scientific’. We will examine various critiques and concerns about experts, and ask to what extent a nonbinary approach addresses those concerns.

Critiques

Expertise as ‘fiction’

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that expertise in policy matters is a ‘fiction, because the kind of knowledge which would be required to sustain it does not exist’ (1984, 75). ‘The social sciences’, he asserts, ‘are almost or perhaps completely devoid of achievement. For the salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-ike generalizations whatsoever.’ Upon examination, ‘alleged laws’ in the social sciences ‘all turn out to be false’, and many of them are so false ‘that no one but a professional social scientist dominated by the conventional philosophy of science would ever have been tempted to believe them’ (88).

Let us bypass the long-standing debate over whether the social sciences can generate ‘law-ike generalizations’. The question here is whether expertise depends upon the existence of such generalizations. It does not. A valuable form of knowledge in our world might be termed an ‘expertise of attention’: one becomes an expert on certain matters by paying sustained attention in a particular sphere. This sphere may be a particular geographical area or set of problems. Rather than being undermined by some of the insights of social constructionism, such expertise is to a large degree entailed by it. Since we do not pay attention to everything at once, our patterns of attention vary in accordance with our practical interests. Some people's particular webs of practice and belief lead to sustained attention upon a limited topic.