The manuscript now contains several bookmarks.
They have been inserted with the confidence of someone intending to return.
Blottisham: I've reached the chapter on experts.
I must say, the author seems unusually fond of them.
Quillibrace: Does he?
Blottisham: I expected a satire.
Instead he appears to be defending expertise.
Stray: I don't think he's defending it.
He's describing its function.
Blottisham: Which is?
Stray: To know more than everyone else.
Quillibrace: No.
To know more about what remains unknown than everyone else.
There is a difference.
Blottisham: Surely expertise consists in possessing answers.
Quillibrace: Only in introductory textbooks.
Among experts themselves, the conversation is generally about the unanswered questions.
Stray: That's true, isn't it?
Whenever specialists speak to the public they explain what is known.
Whenever they speak to one another they discuss what still isn't.
Quillibrace: Precisely.
The frontier is always more interesting than the territory.
(Blottisham considers this.)
Blottisham: Then why does everyone keep saying we should "trust the experts"?
Quillibrace: A curious phrase.
Experts are rarely trustworthy because they know everything.
They are trustworthy because they usually know exactly where certainty ends.
Stray: So expertise isn't the elimination of uncertainty.
It's familiarity with its boundaries.
Quillibrace: Better still.
It is familiarity with the shape of the fog.
Blottisham: That's unhelpfully poetic.
Quillibrace: Only because the landscape is difficult to survey.
(A pause.)
Stray: The manuscript also makes an interesting point about disagreement.
It says outsiders often regard disagreement between experts as evidence that expertise has failed.
Blottisham: Isn't it?
Quillibrace: Quite the reverse.
Experts usually disagree most intensely where the questions become most interesting.
Blottisham: Then what distinguishes an expert from an amateur?
Quillibrace: The amateur has opinions.
The expert has difficulties.
(A silence.)
Blottisham: That's rather unfair.
Quillibrace: To amateurs?
Possibly.
Stray: Or perhaps the expert has learned to see the cost of every answer.
Quillibrace: Yes.
The longer one studies a subject, the more expensive certainty becomes.
Blottisham: That's an extraordinary sentence.
Quillibrace: I thought so too.
Which is why I wish I'd written it.
(They return to the manuscript.)
Stray: Here's another curious observation.
"Authority functions by redistributing uncertainty."
I'm not entirely sure what that means.
Quillibrace: Consider medicine.
Most patients do not wish to master physiology.
They wish to know whom they should ask.
Blottisham: Naturally.
Quillibrace: The uncertainty has not disappeared.
It has moved.
Stray: To someone better equipped to live with it.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
Authority is often less about possessing certainty than about accepting responsibility for uncertainty.
Blottisham: That makes authority sound rather noble.
Quillibrace: Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it merely owns a better filing system.
(A thoughtful silence.)
Blottisham: The manuscript seems surprisingly sympathetic.
I had expected it to expose experts.
Quillibrace: It does.
It simply exposes everyone else at the same time.
Stray: Perhaps that's why it doesn't feel cynical.
No one escapes the pattern.
Quillibrace: Quite.
One should be suspicious of theories in which the author alone remains anthropologically invisible.
(Blottisham closes the manuscript.)
Blottisham: I must confess...
I rather liked experts better when I imagined they knew everything.
Quillibrace: Most people do.
Reality generally asks rather more of them.
The discussion ended with an extended consideration of whether the porter should properly be regarded as the foremost expert on the College or merely the only person who knew where everything actually was.
Opinion remained divided.
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