Accounting for expertise: Wynne and the autonomy of the lay public actor
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that the public understanding of science has eliminated the understanding gap between experts and the public, but erected an ontological gap in its place. Experts are conceived of as unreflexive, but lay public actors as reflexive. To provide a concrete grounding for this claim, this paper offers a conceptual analysis of Brian Wynne's work on the public understanding of science. Wynne's work intersects theorizing about late modernity (explored via a comparison with Beck's and Giddens') and debates about the role of experts and the public in decision-making (explored via a comparison to Collins and Evans). I show that Wynne's work, as with Beck's and Giddens', and Collins and Evans', embodies different conceptions of lay actors. In Wynne's work ambivalence arises concerning whether social identities or social relationships ground the theoretical account. I suggest the tension arises because of the general desire of the social science analyst to preserve the autonomy of the lay actor.
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Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it