Though you may find the repercussions murky, I would maintain that it is of interest to analyze why and how different knowledge claims come into conflict. The characteristics of such conflicts are not always obvious in “public” discussions of issues like risk and security, and that’s one of the reasons to look carefully at the normative rationalities that structure expert practice.

Presumably, experts are people too (not simply points of emanation for some kinds of statements (‘claims and counter-claims’)), and so participate in (and reproduce) publics concerned by things like global warming, terrorist attacks, car crashes, pollution, nuclear proliferation, HIV incidence. Wildavsky notwithstanding, Douglas would certainly not pretend that the experts’ reason stands outside of culture, where culture is a term for connecting up morality, social relations, thought, and meaning. In a world where political decisions are being made with respect to threats of all kinds — and from Douglas’s perspective, it could never be otherwise in any setting for this is the nature of politics and power — a method for describing and analyzing connections of various kinds across the expert, the public, expert publics, lay publics, the zeitgeist, Twitter, and so on, is what is badly needed. While the refinement of an approach that locates risk as one object in a ‘practico-conceptual matrix of knowledge production’ helps to describe °that° problem-space, I continue to find the larger repercussions for actual existing and pressing concerns of the public good difficult to discern, murky.

Discourses of risk/danger expose moral visions about what is important when people agree to live together. Chris’s beautiful discussion (Two Bits) of the social imaginary that is reproduced in and as a certain kind of recursive public — that is, his discussion of the ‘cultural significance’ of this public and its means and media — exemplifies an approach to experts as people, and not just “people.”

For Sunstein and the cognitivists, the task is one of enlightening the public. If we (experts) can just sort out the heuristics that are muddling their risk perception, we can move ahead with rational calculation and decision.

For Jasanoff and the critical STS types, it is perhaps more of a task of enlightening the experts: in order for their decisions to have legitimacy, they have to engage the public. And what we (critical analysts) study is the comparative success or failure of various regulatory authorities to constitute – and deliberate with – a public.

For ARC-types, the interest is in, as SJC says (yes, that rolls right off the keypad) the “practico-conceptual matrix of knowledge production”, public or not. And in the shared problem-space within which experts and their critics make claims and counter-claims. So we might initially ask of this debate: how did experts come to think “public risk perception” was the problem? And what devices are they setting up to manage it?

I wonder what you think of this formulation:

Sunstein wonders about why the public is not rational in its assessment of risk, and explains it in terms of culture.

Jasanoff doubts the legitimacy of expert authority, and reduces it to culture.

We focus on the fact that the experts don’t agree — or that there are different ways that a problem can be problematized. Following Chris, it isn’t a matter of “culture” at all, although there is a different kind of practico-conceptual matrix of knowledge production (which I will NOT call a “style of reasoning”) that is the real object of analysis.

In any case, I agree with your point that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But there does seem to be a different critical instinct behind each.

So my argument is that whatever a public is (in this case, a ‘recursive public’), it is not ‘out there’ as Fox Mulder would say, but immanent to the technical practices. The implication, which is also something I think bothers people, is that people not steeped in these practices are not part of the public. To which I answer, yes, not part of *this* public, which is the one that matters when it comes to much of the software and communication infrastructure permeating our world. I think I could probably mount a very similar argument for the emergence of preparedness or risk regulation, but with a far less ‘open’ and ‘egalitarian’ system of inclusion into the technical practices. Same goes for the current discussions of finance (and I note that Wired magazine, predicatbly, suggested that we should “crowdsource” the regulation of financial transactions).