2. Mary Parker Follett

We rely on experts in many contexts, but within democratic decision making, an expert is positioned in tension with the public. In Creative Experience, Follett states, “We are obliged to choose between the rule of that beneficent despot, the expert, and a muddled, befogged ‘people’ ” (Follett Reference Follett1930, 3). Herein lies the paradox of the role of the expert in democracy—a choice must seemingly be made as to who, expert or public, may act as the arbiter of fact. This separation leads to distrust; it is dangerous, especially for the expert, who Follett argues is prone to a sense of superiority or separation that sometimes accompanies specialized knowledge. “It is not a knowledge of his specialty which makes an expert of service to society,” she writes, “but his insight into the relation of his specialty to the whole. Thus it implies not less but more relation, because the entire value of that specialization is that it is part of something” (Follett Reference Follett1918, 64). Follett contends something bold: The primary purpose of the expert’s specialization is to relate it to the whole of society. Specialized knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, nor above the public, but for the public.

In today’s climate, however, a vast chasm separates the expert from the public, a disconnect that can often cloud each’s ability to see the value in the other. Follett argues, “Democracy does not mean merely all taking part; democracy should mean organization, the relating of parts, co-functioning” (Follett Reference Follett1930, 177). In a properly “co-functioning” democracy, the needs and opinions of the public would be weighed alongside those of the expert. However, members of the public may or may not be well informed regarding the issues at hand, leading to unwise decisions and division. The expert may better understand the intricacies of such questions and problems, but may also disregard the values and situated knowledge of those for whom they are making decisions. Follett believed that the experience of the expert can be complementary to public knowledge; it can inform it more deeply. She writes, “I go to a committee meeting in order that all together we may create a group idea, an idea which will be better than any one of our ideas alone, moreover which will be better than all of our ideas added together. For this group idea will not be produced by any process of addition, but by the interpenetration of us all” (Follett Reference Follett1918, 24). The creative coproduction of ideas and knowledge leads to new, more effective solutions.

What makes it possible for an expert to work together with the public in a way that makes them more informed and better able to voice and realize their unique needs and values, cocreating new ideas? According to Follett, the primary impediment to such cooperation is when experts consider their knowledge superior to the situated knowledge gained by lived experience; this causes a rift between experts and the public, the latter of whom are often directly affected by policies informed by expert advice. Follett argues that both expert knowledge and public, situated knowledge are essential to public decision making. Perceived differences may cause a muddle in communication or in assessing motivations, but for Follett, it is a strength that allows us to engage in productive conversation (Follett Reference Follett1930, 6). Where the typical expert hands down knowledge from above, the integrated expert that Follett envisions works together with the public to share knowledge in a way that allows for fully informed decision making. Public knowledge requires shared and varied experience; the private knowledge of experts from whom the public is isolated cannot legitimately act as knowledge that pertains to the entire public because it neglects its relation to the whole for which it exists.

The public are decision makers who rely on the guidance of experts. After all, Follett notes, “We do not usually think of our relation with the expert as that of a fight. We expect to be able to unite a difference of opinion with the expert. We have gone to him for that purpose” (Follett Reference Follett1942/Reference Follett2013, 257). We rely on an expert for specialist’s knowledge that we may lack. The expert and the ordinary member of the public have different kinds of knowledge and experience. They must come together in discussion, with the goal of reaching a mutually agreeable decision. Though the expert has a view of what must be done, why, and how, the citizen will have knowledge of the particular situation, which may require specific considerations, and the values needed to evaluate possible solutions. Together, their knowledge can be integrated to come to a well-informed decision together. Follett gives us this example:

In this way, experts and publics respectfully take into account the knowledge, expertise, and needs of one another. Follett warns, though, that no one “should abdicate thinking on any subject because of the expert” (ibid.). Thinking, in this context, is the joint activity in which experts and publics work toward a decision where neither is forced to abandon their experience or knowledge. Knowledge is shared, allowing both parties to think creatively about the situation at hand and emerge from the collaboration with a satisfactory outcome. “I wish we could understand the word expert as expressing an attitude of mind which we can all acquire, rather than the collecting of information by a special caste,” she writes in praise of such collaboration (Follett Reference Follett1930, 29). When both parties contribute an attitude that aims toward sharing information and responsibility for decisions, as opposed to feeling a certain possessiveness surrounding access to information or articulating options, it becomes possible to find solutions on equal grounds, together.

History provides examples where Follett’s proposal might have functioned to the benefit of everyone involved. In a classic case study, Brian Wynne examined discourse between scientists and local farmers in Cumbria during the mid-1980s following the Chernobyl disaster, and he found significant reason to believe that, while the farmers took scientific expert knowledge seriously in forming their position, the scientists did not reciprocally consider the local knowledge of the farmers in their determinations (Wynne Reference Wynne1992). Following the accident at Chernobyl, Cumbrian farmers, whose livelihoods depended on their sheep, received continually unreliable and fluctuating information and regulations from experts at the Ministry for Agriculture. The solution handed down to the farmers to combat radiation in the soil ended up causing more harm. Wynne attributes this to the scientists ignoring the farmers’ knowledge of their own local environments. This example identifies a bias on behalf of the scientists and policy makers, who believed that the public was unable to properly understand or implement the bequeathed (and ultimately, problematic) expertise. Disregarding local knowledge and maintaining egoism around expertise is grounds for distrust of experts on the part of private citizens, whose capacity for contextual processing of public information goes unappreciated and misunderstood. This leads to deep fissures between the public and experts, who are not communicating the extent of their knowledge with one another. Respectful circulation of expertise that does not underestimate the public and, instead, works to understand particular needs and social impact, would do more to foster trust in experts. This accords with Follett’s methods, which propose mutually respectful sharing of knowledge between experts and the public.

Follett notes that we each come to a situation with our own perspective. Instead of allowing our personal values and commitments to prevent productive discourse, a collaborative conversation can broaden our own thinking. Instead of the division between an expert and a consenting public, there is a mutual exchange of experience and knowledge that may lead to innovative decisions and methods that benefit both parties. “The essential aim of these, the most democratic movements we have, is to train ourselves, to learn how to use the work of experts, to find our will, to educate our will, to integrate our wills” (Follett Reference Follett1930, 5). This kind of thoughtful intention and consideration allows us to utilize our differences in knowledge, experience, perspectives, and needs to better inform each other. Follett also suggests that facts change, and therefore, the role of the expert changes, and our attending to the facts need also change. The reporting and communicating of facts is often fraught with rhetoric, and Follett understands this as a source of division between the expert and the public. She proposes, “For fact-finding, we must invent a fact-language” (ibid., 23), and she means here that there must be the cultivation of a shared language that is comprehensible to all decision makers involved. The current language, she worries, truncates our ability to integrate effectively because we either defer to the expert to tell us what to do or resent the expert for telling us what to do, instead of working together with the expert to expand our own knowledge and share our own experience so that we might decide together, through a mutual understanding, perhaps even using a cocreated language, what must be done.

Follett’s vision is that cooperation stems from a collaborative group life that is always evolving, always in process, within which the individual feels involved in continuous creative activity. “Democracy is the actual commingling of men in order that each shall have continuous access to the needs and the wants of others…utilizing each, completing his incompleteness” (Follett Reference Follett1918, 160). Democracy in a diverse society happens person-to-person, together, toward collective ends. It welcomes experts into the group to work alongside the public, providing the opportunity for shared knowledge that leads to strong, well-informed, cooperative decision making at all levels.

3. John Dewey

It is no accident that Dewey begins The Public and Its Problems, his major work of democratic theory, with a point of epistemology rather than political theory: He discusses the gap between “facts” and “the meaning of facts.” He makes a kind of underdetermination argument concerning the “meaning” of facts:

Experts communicating some facts beyond their professional context does not necessarily sway public opinion, nor does it spur the public to support any specific action. Resolving this disconnect between the experts and the public requires, for Dewey, a joint process of determining the public meaning of technical facts for shared public action. As action oriented, such interpretation is necessarily value laden. Hence, cooperative environments in which both parties share in processes of inquiry and deliberation is necessary for mutual understanding of meanings and consequences, as well as to increase social intelligence and more effective policy making.

There are two key conditions to Dewey’s account of democracy as social intelligence: publicity and inquiry. Publicity concerns the free sharing of information and expression of opinion through effective channels of communication. “There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on social affairs. Without freedom of expression, not even methods of social inquiry can be developed” (ibid., 339). The sharing of information includes both expert and local knowledge, as well as the expression of values and opinions. Expert knowledge must be accessible to some degree to the public, if not in every technical respect, then at least to the point of permitting understanding of the consequences of public concern. Everyone must be free to express their situated knowledge as well as their views on common goals and what is to be done.

Dewey’s conception of democracy as social intelligence also requires cultivating methods of inquiry in a cooperative context. Dewey’s theory of inquiry has three core features, which we label pragmatism, experimentalism, and fallibilism. Pragmatism is Dewey’s view that belief and action are linked; inquiry is not the disinterested explanation of facts, but the resolution of a problematic situation enabling successful action (Brown Reference Brown2012). The same “logic of inquiry” thus applies to everyday decisions, policy making, and science. Dewey’s theory is experimentalist, wherein hypotheses are assessed by trying them out and determining their actual consequences, judging whether these meet expectations that are satisfactory in resolving the problematic situation. This experimental method applies as much to moral and political theory as to physical science; to call it “experimental” highlights “a certain logic of method” rather than experiments conducted under laboratory conditions (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1927, 361). Finally, the fallibilism of Dewey’s theory of inquiry means that all principles are provisional hypotheses, and all judgments are revisable in light of future evidence. Epistemic humility is a crucial virtue to be cultivated in social inquiry.

Democracy, for Dewey, requires cooperative inquiry into matters of public interest. Publics are defined as “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (ibid., 245–46). Public interests exist because of interdependence, because our actions in society have consequences for others. Democratic communication, consultation, and debate make possible the recognition of public interests as shared problems that require collaborative solutions, and hence, require shared social inquiry. Publicity and inquiry are thus dependent on each other as conditions of democracy.

Why not simply turn technically complex social problems over to the experts? Like Follett, Dewey worries that experts on their own can become a class with private interests that are imposed on inquiry: “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all…. No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few” (ibid., 365). In Dewey’s estimation, only shared inquiry can prevent decision making that is dominated by the interests of the few. Through cooperative processes, social-technical knowledge becomes a coproduction of the public alongside experts. Both are equally necessary; in Dewey’s homespun example, “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied” (ibid., 364). In this scenario, to find the best solution, we need both the person(s) whose life is affected by these circumstances, as well as those with the technical knowledge and skill to understand the causes of the circumstances and their potential solutions. Cooperative, nonhierarchical inquiry is necessary for the shoe (metaphorical or otherwise) to fit properly.

4. A Positive Proposal

Some aspects of the approach found in Dewey and Follett can be seen in existing approaches to the science-public interface. For instance, the WorldWideViews citizen consultation methodology is an approach that brings members of the public together to deliberate about some policy issue where complex and publicly controversial science is relevant (WorldWideViews n.d.; see Douglas Reference Douglas2021, 141–43). They are informed by the experts, engaged in a structured deliberative dialogue, and then they vote on the question. Deliberative polling is a similar process developed by James Fishkin (Reference Fishkin2009; see Kitcher Reference Kitcher2011, 223–26). As Heather Douglas points out, these specific deliberative forums do raise the level of democratic discourse about the issues, and they do lead their participants to be better-informed and come to better assessments of the issues, but these are not genuinely collaborative projects (op cit.). The science is taken as fixed and the role of experts is to inform. While the public can ask experts questions in some of these forums, experts still maintain a position of magisterial authority. The direction and the conduct of future research is unaffected by these interactions.

More genuinely collaborative processes are necessary. One classic example is the “analytic-deliberative” method for risk assessment and management. This framework was proposed in the 1996 National Research Council report, Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society (Stern and Fineberg Reference Stern and Fineberg1996). It required specific feedback from decision makers and public stakeholders throughout the research process into environmental risks and sees the scientific process of risk assessment as inherently continuous with the political process of risk management. In a similar vein, Bryan Norton (Reference Norton, Keulartz, Korthals, Schermer and Swierstra2002) has brought philosophical attention to the process of adaptive management in resource and ecosystem management as an iterative, collaborative approach to combined research and intervention. To a greater extent, these proposals better implement the pragmatist insights from a century ago that we have reconstructed here, though it remains unclear that public stakeholders are true partners in these processes.

The contemporary role of experts typically involves a strict division of labor that results in tension between experts and the public or their representatives. Experts determine facts needed to make informed decisions, while the public and their representatives combine facts with values to make decisions—we separate facts from values, experts from the public, technical issues from political ones. The tendency is toward technocracy; in the face of persistent political disagreement, decision makers try to find neutral grounds to avoid resolving disagreements or acknowledging the reality of diverging values and lived experiences. To achieve this neutrality, political issues are “depoliticized,” transformed into purely technical questions, while experts increasingly become the “neutral,” “trustworthy” decision makers. However, this gambit fails in practice to resolve political controversies (Sarewitz Reference Sarewitz2004), and as a result, experts are increasingly seen as untrustworthy decision makers. Experts are seen as a group pushing their own perspective and agenda (political, financial, or otherwise) while pretending not to have one, but the public knows this cannot be the case. Thus, we see the public increasingly resist deference to scientific expertise. While science remains a reliable pathway for understanding significant issues, risks, and relationships, reasonable concerns from nonexperts often go unacknowledged or devalued, and this neglect can entail consequences that affect lives and livelihoods.

As a result, political deference to the decisions of experts tends perversely to politicize expertise. We seek out alternative sets of experts to provide alternative sets of facts, so that we get the decisions we want. This has all the disadvantages of politics-as-usual, plus all the genuine value disagreements are hidden, not transparent. Dewey believes this tension between experts and the public can be dangerous, warning, “It is assumed that the policies of the experts are in the main both wise and benevolent, that is, framed to conserve the genuine interests of society. The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses…the wise cease to be wise…. In the degree in which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1927, 364). Omitting the voice of the public in favor of the expert creates rifts and prevents policy from being effective.

In the era of worldwide access to knowledge, expertise is seemingly no longer a public good; instead, it has become a site of political dissent and dispute. Both Follett and Dewey propose that experts and the public must have shared experience, shared language, and collaborative processes of shared decision making. Knowledge becomes comingled in ways that develop and deepen it. The expert is invited to reorient themselves toward the needs communicated by the public to foster relationships of trust (Follett Reference Follett1930, 21). This requires, in Follett’s opinion, a “scientific” attitude that will “enable us to work with professional experts and to find our place in a society which needs the experience of all, to build up a society which shall embody the experience of all” (ibid., 30). Follett, like Dewey, believes that the solution lies in equipping the public with the scientific attitude required to become experts. In this way, expert knowledge becomes shared public knowledge.

We posit four features of trustworthy public science that are supported by the thought of Dewey and Follett:

1. 1. Science and expert advice aim first to promote the public good.

2. 2. Science and expert advice are accountable to the public.

3. 3. Facts and solutions are codetermined and coproduced by scientists and decision makers.

4. 4. Communication and cooperation between experts and publics are two-way, democratic, and nonhierarchical.

For these two thinkers, what is needed is collaborative, cooperative shared inquiry, in which facts, values, and decisions are codetermined. The public needs the aid of technical experts who aim toward the public good and are competent, principled, sensitive, and responsible. They need reliable and objective experts who are willing to cooperate with them toward solving social problems. Recognizing the public as their partners and the initiators of social inquiry, experts would come to see themselves as public servants, as facilitators of democracy, and as protectors of the public good. Public science must be accountable, not to the public whim, but to earnest assessments from the public of what promotes their interests.

There are many forces arrayed against restoring trust in science: institutional inertia, misconceptions about science, the interests of global capitalism, and the rising neo-fascism around the world. Many of these same forces oppose increasing and improving democracy, and seek to roll back many of the gains of democracy achieved in the twentieth century. It is absolutely crucial to break the problematic sociocultural and institutional entanglements that make science untrustworthy. Here, we must turn to the pragmatist account of democratic experimentalism through cooperative social inquiry and action. Science and democracy are natural allies that can and must join forces to protect each other and build a better world. It will not be easy to achieve, but worthwhile social goals rarely are.