Page - 170 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

discussion of legal autopoiesis. However, for present purposes, it should be noted that this incommensurability also afflicts those Neo-Weberian perspectives, which focus on the ways in which professional groups further their collective interests, through processes of inclusion and exclusion. Such theories view scientific controversy, and consensus-building, as activities central to the shaping of group cohesion.1 A further version of this demarcation theory revolves around the proposition that disciplines and professions themselves define their borders, through ‘boundary work’. Thus, the practice of inclusion and exclusion comes to determine what is science, and what is non-science. Such accounts, it is argued, are more adequately explained from an autopoietic perspective. It may be pertinent, at this point, to discuss the ways in which forensic expertise travels across legal, and scientific, disciplinary boundaries by returning to Wynne’s seminal Science and Technology Studies (STS) research into the tacit knowledge of Cumbrian hill farmers, exhibited in the wake of the Chernobyl reactor incident.2 Wynne was able to demonstrate that the hill- farmers possessed a significant body of tacit knowledge, and expertise (by Collins’ definition), which complemented the certified expertise of nuclear experts. However, they lacked the interactional expertise necessary to enter into a dialogue with the certified experts. As Jasanoff states, ‘the farmers and radiation experts possessed different, complementary knowledges about local soils, grazing conditions, and radioactive cesium uptake into vegetation…but more significant is the fact that these discrepancies were rooted in different life worlds, entailing altogether different perceptions of uncertainty, predictability and control. The knowledges stemming from these divergent experiential contexts were not simply additive; they represented radically ‘other’ ways of understanding the world.’3 Jasanoff’s account of Wynne’s study highlights the incommensurability of heterogeneous disciplinary, and non-disciplinary, perspectives, which share no common context – whether perceptual, cognitive, or epistemological – and of the inability of non-experts to account for, and overcome, such limitations. Wynne’s experience resonates with Kruse’ ethnographic account of the co-production of legal and forensic narratives: 1 See Collins, H. & Evans, R. 2007, Rethinking Expertise (University of Chicago Press: Chicago); Lawless, C (2016) Forensic Science: A Sociological introduction (Routledge: New York) at page 3; 2 Wynne, B. (1989). Sheepfarming after Chernobyl: A case study in communicating scientific information. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 31(2), 10-39. 3 Jasanoff, S. (2003) ‘Breaking the Waves in Science Studies: Comment on H.M. Collins and Robert Evans, ‘The Third Wave of Science‘: Social Studies of Science 33/3(June 2003) pp. 389–400 at p.390; it is argued below that, in accordance with autopoietic theory, the hill-farmers knowledge failed to overcome the binary coding (scientific/unscientific) of the science sub-system. 170