The association of knowledge with interests, that knowledge is always developed through guidance by interests, might begin to make one nervous.  We all depend on the specialized knowledge of others for our daily lives.  We depend on the ones who produce our food, on the ones who work the networks that transport and make it available to us, and also on inspectors who check on it at every stage, to make sure it is safe and is what it purports to be.  Same for our water supply, the places we live and dwell in, the removal of waste, sanitation, energy.  Not to mention the experts who work to provide us with health care and medicines, lawyers who assist us with navigating the framework of rules our societies are organized with, and so on and on and on…  We are all familiar with difficult situations when we have found ourselves in need of expert assistance.  Situations that can range from a leaky pipe in our house, or from a problem with our car, to illness.  Does the whole wall have to come down?  Does the car really need a new engine?  How serious is my illness and how appropriate or effective is the proposed treatment?  We cannot even judge whether the approach to our problem suggested by experts is relevant, feasible, how risky, or even how likely to succeed.  And we also realize that experts rely on making their expertise relevant to our problems in order to make a living.  Hence the well-worn advice to always seek a second expert opinion.

Our survival basically depends on the specialized knowledge, on the expertise of others.  At the same time, the survival of the ones with the specialized knowledge, of the experts themselves, depends on their expertise being useful, or at least being perceived of being useful, by the rest of us.  We are quite well aware of this need; we understand the interest of the experts in having their expert knowledge being actually used.  The awareness that experts have a vital interest in their knowledge being used makes us even more nervous.  We are all quite concerned about depending on someone else’s expert knowledge, as we usually have no way of evaluating that knowledge on our own.  Our concerns appear to be well-founded, as many times expert knowledge fails us.  Sometimes the failure is due to incompetence, for example when a medical doctor prescribes the wrong treatment per the standards of medical practice, or a driver fails to reduce speed and the train derails.  Sometimes the failure is due to fraud, for example when an engineer knowingly uses materials that are not up to specifications to build a house, or a car computer’s software has been adjusted to falsely indicate compliance with regulations.  Sometimes the failure is due to the limitations of expert knowledge.  After all, even authoritative expert knowledge changes with time, as, for example, is the case for medical advice for the treatment of certain conditions or the efficacy of particular drugs.

Expert knowledge is the result of a vast amount of hard work engaging with the material world.  It takes the sustained effort of many individuals to develop a field of specialized knowledge; effort that takes place over many years, decades, centuries even, with knowledge accumulating and transmitted across generations.  Individual experts do not rely on their own personal experience to tackle every challenge, or develop all their expert knowledge from scratch; they rely instead on the work and experience of previous generations and the training by older experts.  In short, expertise requires the existence of a community of experts, a community that persists over time.  Communities of experts maintain themselves by recruiting new members, training and socializing them into the specialized knowledge, the practices, the ways of the community.  The hard work required for the development and maintenance of expertise does not allow the experts to make a living independently and so the support of expert communities by the broader society is necessary.

These considerations highlight the interests that guide the development and maintenance of all expert knowledge.  Expert knowledge has to be promoted, valorized, and accepted as useful by society at large.  In addition, a community of experts has to be supported and maintained long-term, it has to persist across generations.  So, expert knowledge has to be integrated into the life of the broader society, and a sufficient number of experts has to be trained on a continuous basis.  Several expert communities have been eminently successful at achieving this.  The relevance of expertise in different areas of Physics, Chemistry or Biology for contemporary life is fairly obvious when we note the widespread use of, say, electronic devices, all sorts of synthetic chemicals, or genetically modified organisms.  Another obviously relevant area is Medicine, with regular health check-ups as well as diagnostic tests being strongly promoted by medical experts.  Accounting, Engineering, Agronomy, Geology, Sociology, Philology, Education, … the list of areas of expertise relevant to contemporary life is fairly long.  Again, for a field of expertise to stick around, it has to maintain its relevance for the broader society and new experts have to be produced continuously.  Otherwise, the particular experts will not be able to make a living, new experts will not be trained, and the particular expert knowledge will be lost.  Manual typesetting for printing, photographic film development, stenography, are a few examples of skills (and expertise) that are much less relevant nowadays or have even disappeared.  Many artisanal skills for example have disappeared with the mass production of goods, and many more may be lost with the advent of machine learning and automation.

It is not surprising that expert communities place a lot of emphasis on and put a lot of effort towards maintaining their relevance for the broader society.  In contemporary societies, a major way by which expert communities have advanced their interests is professionalization.  Professionalization promotes the establishment of training and performance standards for the particular expertise and safeguards the survival of the expert community within the broader society.  “Turf wars” among specialists for who gets to fulfill the needs of the broader society – and reap the corresponding rewards – are a common occurrence.  Conflicts among medical and nursing specialists, or among ophthalmologists and optometrists, or conflicts regarding who can inspect buildings, goods, accounting records… and so on.

The above considerations readily apply to scientific knowledge and expertise.  For fields of scientific expertise to survive, they have to maintain their broader relevance, and they have to keep training students to replenish their pool of experts.  Failure to do so results in the shrinking of the pool of experts and the eventual disappearance of the field of expertise.