Singing Experts III: Specialists

This is part three of a series of articles about singing expertise. I recommend you read part one here and part two here if you haven’t already.

Last time, we discussed the idea that expertise is rooted in a social process where the chief acquisition is “tacit knowledge”. This idea comes from the books Are We All Scientific Experts Now? and Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins. We also looked at a breakdown of types of experts into three broad groups of “ubiquitous”, “specialist” and “meta” expertise. Let’s go further and look at the “specialists” since this is what concerns us most for singing.

What is a Specialist?

Specialists have acquired expertise that is not ubiquitous. That sounds obvious, but when we remember that skills exist for which there is ubiquitous expertise (such as manners or one’s native language), then specialism itself stands in starker relief. For example, I might be a ubiquitous expert in speaking English simply because it’s my native tongue, but I’m not a specialist in it. An English teacher who teaches English speakers would be a teaching specialist because not everyone has the requisite skills, thus making it non-ubiquitous. Collins describes it:

Specialist expertise is what is possessed by a doctor, a concert violinist, a carpenter, a physicist, a mathematician, a truck driver, an engineer and so on. ‘Specialists’ are mostly what people, including professional psychologists, are thinking of when they talk of experts.[1]

He then breaks down specialists into a further five categories beneath two larger umbrella categories.

Ubiquitous Tacit Knowledge

The first three constitute a group who are not quite professional experts. He labels them as having “Ubiquitous Tacit Knowledge”. These are based on the ability to read about a subject[2], but one could easily think of these as levels of knowledge that a layperson might have:

1. Beer-Mat Knowledge: A light understanding of a subject roughly equivalent to whatever information could fit on a beer mat. Trivia falls into this category.[3]
2. Popular understanding is based on summaries in science magazines, TV shows, or books. Those of us who aren’t specialists in a field probably have popular understanding about a variety of scientific subjects. It is, however, nuance-less in many respects.[4]
3. Primary source knowledge comes from reading scholarly articles directly. This might be difficult as a layperson, but it is possible. What this doesn’t do is lend any kind of context to the articles. There are a set of standards against which articles are judged by the scientific/professional community that are simply unavailable to those who aren’t directly a part of it.[5] A singing equivalent would be someone who chooses to not find a teacher but instead reads the works of Garcia, Miller and Coffin hoping that those works will teach them to sing.

The above three groups are not scientific/professional-grade experts. I don’t believe that the above types of expertise are worthless. We all have subjects about which we are mildly or deeply interested but in which we are not experts. Many of us have opinions backed by real information on medicine, astronomy, fitness and so on that help us determine how to live our lives. After all, we can’t become experts in everything, and we can’t consult experts for every choice.

But we aren’t professional-grade experts in those subjects. It’s hard and verging on impossible to judge the validity of two equally plausible theories accurately when one lacks expertise therein. Just look at public debates about conflicting weight loss strategies. Non-experts can easily become enchanted with an idea because from a distance the uncertainty of experts regarding their own ideas gets lost.[6] Additionally, we should be cautious second-guessing actual experts in these fields. If one of our opinions based on our “popular understanding” or “primary source knowledge” is refuted by a expert specialist, then we should reevaluate our opinion at the very least.

Specialist Tacit Knowledge

The final two groups have “Specialist Tacit Knowledge”:

1. Interactional expertise comes from spending time with other experts and becoming part of a community of experts. People with this level have learned “to master the language of a specialist domain in the absence of practical knowledge.”
2. Contributory expertise comes from those who – as the name suggests – contribute to a field directly. This is the most obvious form of expertise, and it comes from learning how things are done via formal training or apprenticeship in addition to spending time with other experts.[7]

You can think of the above two groups as having professional level expertise, and you can picture these categories in a [table] like this:

Ubiquitous Tacit Knowledge			Specialist Tacit Knowledge
Beer-mat knowledge	Popular understanding	Primary Source Knowledge	Interactional Expertise	Contributory Expertise

Synthesis

This breakdown of specialist expertise has really spoken to me. I’d always had a sense that there was a difference between someone who’d read a lot about a subject compared to someone who’d worked directly with other experts, but I couldn’t quite explain what that difference was.

Before I go further into the process of becoming an expert or go over the types of singing expertise, I want to discuss some of the ideas embedded in this concept of expertise a bit more and try and synthesize them. As I’ve been looking at this material, I’ve had to ask myself what I believe expertise is, and – at the very least – that’s been an enlightening process. However, I do have questions about the material itself as well, and I’m trying to avoid becoming too unrealistically enchanted with these ideas since I am at a great distance from the sociology world. Until next time!

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