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In Part I of this two part paper we tried to elicit the ‘essence’ of the notion of interactional expertise by looking at its origins. In Part II we will look at the notion of contributory expertise. The exercise has been triggered by recent discussion of these concepts in this journal by Plaisance and Kennedy and by Goddiksen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to Ribeiro and Lima’s paper on interactional expertise, we argue that, by not incorporating the insights of constructivist social science, their analysis goes backwards rather than advancing the debate. We show that much of the evidence they present does not lead to the conclusions they draw. We also critically examine the idea of physical contiguity, which forms a central part of Ribeiro and Lima’s position. We show that its meaning is ambiguous. We conclude by suggesting that more research on the nature and influence of physical contiguity would be interesting in its own right but that it would not bear on the notion of interactional expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collins and Evans have proposed a ‘normative theory of expertise’ as a way to solve the ‘problem of demarcation’ in public debates involving technical matters. Their argument is that all citizens have the right to participate in the ‘political’ phases of such debates, while only three types of experts should have a voice in the ‘technical’ phases. In this article, Collins and Evans’ typology of expertise – in particular, the idea of ‘interactional expertise’ – is the focus of a detailed empirical, methodological and philosophical analysis. As a result, we reaffirm the difference between practitioners and non-practitioners, contesting the four central claims about interactional expertise – namely, that (1) the idea of interactional expertise has been proven empirically, (2) it is possible to develop interactional expertise through ‘linguistic socialization alone’, (3) the idea of interactional expertise supports the ‘the minimal embodiment thesis’ that the individual human body or, more broadly, ‘embodiment’ is not as relevant as linguistic socialization for acquiring a language and (4) interactional experts have the same linguistic fluency, understanding and judgemental abilities of practitioners within discursive settings. Instead, we argue, individuals’ abilities and understandings vary according to the ‘type of immersion’ they have experienced within a given practice and whether they bring with them another ‘perspective’. Acknowledging these differences helps with demarcation but does not solve the ‘problem of demarcation’. Every experience is perspectival and cannot handle, alone, the intertwined and complex issues found in public debates involving technical matters. The challenge, then, concerns the ways to mediate interactions between actors with distinct perspectives, experiences and abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Part I of this two part paper we try to set out the ‘essence’ of the notion of interactional expertise by starting with its origins. In Part II we will look at the notion of contributory expertise. The exercise has been triggered by recent discussion of these concepts in this journal by Plaisance and Kennedy and by Goddiksen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential and relevance of an innovative sociological research method known as the Imitation Game for research in health care. Whilst this method and its potential have until recently only been explored within sociology, there are many interesting and promising facets that may render this approach fruitful within the health care field, most notably to questions about the experiential knowledge or 'expertise' of chronically ill patients (and the extent to which different health care professionals are able to understand this experiential knowledge). The Imitation Game can be especially useful because it provides a way to map this experiential knowledge more systematically, without falling in the dual trap of either over-relying on in-depth, but highly specific phenomenological 'insider'-approaches that are hard to generalize, or, alternatively, problematically reducing the rich life-worlds of patients to a set of indicators in a questionnaire. The main focus of this paper is theoretical and conceptual: explaining the Imitation Game method, discussing its usefulness in the health care domain, and exploring the ways in which the approach can be utilized for chronic illness care. The paper presents both a conceptual and empirical exploration of how the Imitation Game method and its underlying theoretical concepts of 'contributory expertise' and 'interactional expertise' can be transferred from the sociological realm to the field of health care, what kinds of insights can be gained from the method, which methodological issues it may raise, and what potentially fruitful research routes can be explored. I argue that the Imitation Game can be thought of as a 'social learning experiment' that simultaneously enables the participants to learn from each other's perspectives, allows researchers to explore exciting new possibilities, and also offers the tools to intervene in the practice that is being studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We question the logic of Coopmans and Button’s critique of our analysis of expertise on three grounds. First, their critique depends on a clear distinction between actor and analysts that we show cannot be maintained. Second, we question their reticence to allow the use of taxonomies in the analysis of expertise, suggesting that it is contradicted by their own descriptions of expert work, and we accuse them of making a mistake in the way they relate commonsense to specialist skills. Finally, we express our puzzlement at the antiseptic-like precautions that some ethnomethodologists apply to analysts’ categories, especially given that – as we show – analysts’ categories sometimes provide a superior resource for understanding and can change the actors’ world as well as describing it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on empirical material concerning the communication and use of knowledge in experimental physics and its relations to the culture of theoretical physics. The role that trust plays in these interactions is used to create a model of social distance between interacting theoretical and experimental cultures. This article thus seeks to reintroduce trust as a fundamental element in answering the problem of disunity in the sociology of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the distinction between contributory expertise and interactional expertise developed by Harry Collins and Robert Evans over a series of publications. The distinction has been widely adopted and used to analyze the expertise of different groups of people, such as scientists, journalists and color blind. While the distinction is a fruitful tool to begin thinking about expertise in a more structured way, one also finds substantial inconsistencies and unnecessary vagueness in Collins and Evans' writings. Clarifying these issues will make the distinction an even more useful tool for analyzing expertise in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of interactional expertise – characterized by sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans as the ability to speak the language of a discipline without the corresponding ability to practice – can serve as a powerful way of breaking down expert/non-expert dichotomies and providing a role for new voices in specialist communities. However, in spite of the vast uptake of this concept and its potential to fruitfully address many important issues related to scientific expertise, there has been surprisingly little critical analysis of it. We seek to remedy this situation by considering potential benefits of interactional expertise and the ways in which the current conception can – and cannot – realize those benefits. In particular, we argue that interactional expertise hasn't reached its full potential for addressing who ought to be involved in scientific research and decision-making, largely owing to an unnecessarily restrictive way of operationalizing the concept. In its place, we offer a broader, more pluralistic account of interactional expertise – one that is in line with the original spirit of the concept, but also captures the diversity that we see as being an important aspect of interactional experts and the value they can bring to the table. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Policy deliberation is considered an integral part of good policy-making. In many policy sectors, however, the processes of participation are not developed enough to support the potential for policy deliberation. Expert deliberation carried out as a part of a wider policy process creates a challenging situation because participants are simultaneously expected to solve policy problems collectively while coping with the diverse interests of various stakeholder groups. In this article, I evaluate expert participation in three sequences of a waste policy reformulation process. Two of the sequences represent formal expert participation and the third a more informal one. Of particular interest in the evaluation is the participants' ability to produce novel solutions for politically sensitive policy problems. The analytical framework for the evaluation is built on the trading zone metaphor inspired by Peter Galison's work. The results of the study indicate that the formal sequences of expert participation were characterized by the strategic behaviour of the participants, which made knowledge networking and the generation of novel ideas difficult, whereas the more informal sequence that was organized around one issue at a time was more capable of producing solutions to long-standing policy problems. Additionally, the sequences with more formal participation did not contain the elements of interactional expertise associated with successful knowledge networking. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a new research method called the Imitation Game. The method is based on the idea of ‘interactional expertise’, which distinguishes discursive performance from practical expertise and can be used to investigate the relationship between groups that diverge culturally or experientially. We explain the theory that underpins the method and report results from a number of empirical trials. These include ‘proof of concept’ research with the colour blind, the blind and those with perfect pitch, as well as Imitation Games on more conventional sociological topics such as the social relationships between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, and active Christians and secular students. These studies demonstrate the potential of the method and its distinctive features. We conclude by suggesting that the Imitation Game could complement existing techniques by providing a new way to compare social relationships across social and temporal distances in both a qualitative and a quantitative way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One formative idea behind the workshop on expertise in Berkeley in August of 2010 was to develop a viable 'trading zone' of ideas, which is defined as a location 'in which communities with a deep problem of communication manage to communicate' (Collins et al. , p. 8). In the current case, the goal is to have a trading zone between philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists who communicate their ideas on expertise such that productive interdisciplinary collaboration results. In this paper, I review Harry Collins' three-dimensional model of expertise and provide a very brief and non-inclusive overview of a psychological response. In addition, I propose an addendum to the model by adding a fourth-natural talent-dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In exploring his concept of interactional expertise in the context of managers of big science projects, Collins identifies the development and deployment tacit knowledge as central, but acknowledges that sociologically, he cannot probe the concept further in developmental or pedagogical directions. In using the term tacit knowledge, Collins relies on the concept as articulated by Michael Polanyi. In coining the term, Polanyi acknowledges his reliance on Heidegger's concept of being-in-the-world. This paper explores how Polanyi, and so Collins, fails to adequately ground the idea of the tacit in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. In so doing, it employs a rereading of Being and Time to phenomenologically resituate the tacit. This resituating of the tacit allows us to go further than Collins in providing developmental and pedagogical approaches to the tacit in the context of the kind of interactional expertise that may be employed to enhance the effectiveness of collaborative, multi-and interdisciplinary teams like those found in team science and in professional settings like healthcare management. As illustrative, the paper provides an example of this resituated understanding of the tacit in the author's work teaching in a multidisciplinary healthcare management program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactional expertise is said to be a form of knowledge achieved in a linguistic community and, therefore, obtained entirely outside practice. Supposedly, it is not or only minimally sustained by the so-called embodied knowledge. Here, drawing upon studies in contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, I propose that 'derived' embodiment is deeply involved in competent language use and, therefore, also in interactional expertise. My argument consists of two parts. First, I argue for a strong relationship among language acquisition, language use and the real world (i.e. the world accessible to the senses). Biological constraints in very early childhood anchor language to the body. These constraints are by-products of our evolutionary peculiarity that we gain because of our physical and psychological immaturity at birth. Thus, infancy is predominantly concerned with the bodily needs and experiences of the concrete while language acquisition takes place. Particular interest in the concrete furnishes our linguistic world and installs 'concrete' language as the principal constituent of competent language use. Second, I argue that well-established concrete language implicitly and explicitly elicits mental representations, namely partial reactivations of sensorimotor states that occur during experience. These are stepping stones by which we subsequently make sense of expressions in new linguistic areas. Like any competent language user, the interactional expert, therefore, prompts multimodal imagination and re-enacts concrete experiences when acquiring linguistic knowledge pertaining to a specialist field. Finally, I outline the characteristics of those imaginative powers to identify mechanisms that improve interactional expertise and discuss the obvious relation between interactional expertise and ordinary knowledge acquisition after the concrete language stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical sociology has traditionally contrasted the bio-medical knowledge of healthcare professionals with the socially situated knowledge possessed by patients. These differences are particularly important in chronic conditions where patients can develop highly sophisticated understandings of their disease and its symptoms. In this paper we use a novel research method - The Imitation Game - to explore how far the experiential knowledge of patients can be appreciated and understood by medical professionals. We examine the extent to which professional dietitians were able to reproduce the discourse of people diagnosed with coeliac disease and show that dietitians were able to 'pass' as patients with coeliac disease but that a control group of lay people could not. We also briefly explore the domains of knowledge in which dietitians tended to be more or less successful and reflect on the utility of the research for medical sociology and the training of healthcare professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous transdisciplinary research initiatives underway today are proceeding with only limited understanding of the ways in which the intellectually diverse groups central to such efforts work together. The concept of trading zones offers an alternate yet complementary look at cross-disciplinary collaborations and in particular offers a more thorough treatment of the communication and coordination challenges implicit in such initiatives. More specifically, this paper proposes boundary objects, interactional expertise, and interlanguage as means to overcome epistemic and communication barriers in transdisciplinary groups. This analysis focuses on the development of collective understanding and language in intellectually diverse groups and theorizes a transdisciplinary trading zone as a means to understand better cross-disciplinary approaches to addressing complex social, economic or environmental challenges. Taken together, the concepts of transdisciplinarity and trading zones offer a more complete understanding of heterogeneous group dynamics and the evolution of shared meaning and creation of integrated knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because wicked problems are beyond the scope of normal, industrial-age engineering science, sustainability problems will require reform of current engineering science and technology practices. We assert that, while pluralism concerning use of the term sustainability is likely to persist, universities should continue to cultivate research and education programs specifically devoted to sustainable engineering science, an enterprise that is formally demarcated from business-as-usual and systems optimization approaches. Advancing sustainable engineering science requires a shift in orientation away from reductionism and intellectual specialization towards integrative approaches to science, education, and technology that: (1) draw upon an ethical awareness that extends beyond the usual bounds of professional ethics or responsible conduct of research to include macroethics, (2) adopt anticipatory and adaptive approaches to unintended consequences resulting from technological innovation that result in more resilient systems, and (3) cultivate interactional expertise to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchange. Unfortunately, existing education and research training programs are ill-equipped to prepare scientists and engineers to operate effectively in a wicked problems milieu. Therefore, it is essential to create new programs of graduate education that will train scientists and engineers to become sustainable engineering science experts equipped to recognize and grapple with the macro-ethical, adaptive, and cross-disciplinary challenges embedded in their technical research and development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the relative contributions of language and physical practice to practical understanding? The resolution of a series of puzzles depends upon the answer. I argue that language is, and must be, more central than physical practice in individual acquisition of practical understanding. Only this makes it possible for there to be a sociology of scientific knowledge, for there to be scientific specialities, for there to be a division of labour in society and for there to be a society that is more than a set of narrow and isolated worlds. Physical practice remains central to human culture but its influence is at the collective level at which languages are formed, rather than the individual level at which practical abilities are acquired. Domain languages ‘contain’ practices, and it is from these that individuals draw much, usually most, of their practical understanding. Because the individual level and the domain level have not previously been distinguished, certain philosophical problems have been wrongly cast and mistakes have been made. Domains of practice/language are embedded within one another in fractal-like relationships, and this is how we can make sense of higher levels of coordinated action. The ideas of ‘special interactional expert’, ‘practice language’ and ‘methodological interactionalism’ are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the evolution of a trading zone by organizing the case study of turtle excluder devices within the model proposed by . The case study offers evidence that trading zones do evolve and that the concepts of enforced and fractionated trading zones hold practical utility for describing and defining the complexities of actual exchanges. In this case a trading zone evolved from enforced to fractionated and ultimately diverged into two trading zones. For each step of the evolution I describe the forces that drove these transitions. Finally, I present an adapted trading zone model that is conceptually a better fit for the turtle excluder device case study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technological direction occurs at or just after the point of breakthrough; that is also the point where the long-term implications are hardest to visualize. Recent work on shared expertise in Science & Technology Studies (STS) can help create productive collaborations among scientists, engineers, ethicists and other stakeholders as these new systems are designed and implemented. But collaboration across these disciplines will be successful only if scientists, engineers, and ethicists can communicate meaningfully with each other. The establishment of a trading zone coupled with moral imagination present one method for such collaborative communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and evaluates two advanced courses organised in Oxford as part of the European project Nanobio-RAISE and suggests using their format to encourage multidisciplinary engagement between nanoscientists and nanoethicists. Several nanoethicists have recently identified the need for ‘better’ ethics of emerging technologies, arguing that ethical reflection should become part and parcel of the research and development (R&D) process itself. Such new forms of ethical deliberation, it is argued, transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and require the active engagement and involvement of both nanoethicists and nanoscientists with the broader issues surrounding technological developments. Whereas significant research efforts into multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations during R&D processes are now emerging, opportunities for encouraging multidisciplinary engagement through education have remained relatively underexplored. This paper argues that educational programmes could be a natural extension of ongoing collaborative research efforts ‘in the lab’ and analyses how the Nanobio-RAISE courses could be used as a model for course development. In addition to exploring how the elements that were conducive to multidisciplinary engagement in this course could be preserved in future courses, this paper suggests shifting the emphasis from public communication towards ethical deliberation. Further course work could thus build capacity among both nanoscientists and nanoethicists for doing ‘better’ nanoethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As computating technologies become ubiquitous and at least partly autonomous, they will have increasing impact on societies, both in the developed and developing worlds. This article outlines a framework for guiding emerging technologies in directions that promise social as well as technical progress. Multiple stakeholders will have to be engaged in dialogues over new technological directions, forming trading zones in which knowledge and resources are exchanged. Such discussions will have to incorporate cultural and individual values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an extensive literature in cognitive science on the acquisition of expertise and its use in a wide range of scientific and technological domains. There is also a new research program in science and technology studies devoted to studies of expertise and experience. This article links these two literatures on expertise to the literature on scientific and technological thinking and derives a framework for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this four part exchange, Evan Selinger starts by stating that Collins’s empirical evidence in respect of linguistic socialization and its bearing on artificial intelligence and expertise is valuable; it advances philosophical and sociological understanding of the relationship between knowledge and language. Nevertheless, he argues that Collins mischaracterizes the data under review and thereby misrepresents how knowledge is acquired and understates the extent to which expert knowers are embodied. Selinger reconstructs the case for the importance of the body in the initial acquisition of language and challenges Collins to show how a disembodied entity could become fluent in any language at all. Collins responds by accepting that his approach does not demonstrate quite as much about the irrelevance of the body as he thought it did but that even though he accepts all of Selinger’s claims, ‘the body’ as needed by the philosophical approach set out by Selinger is still a vestigial thing. Collins’s main point, however, is that the philosophical view of the body—the world is divided into embodied agents and unembodied entities—distracts attention from the more interesting empirically researchable question of how the ability to become socialized diminishes, if it does, as the body become more and more minimal. The right research question is not about whether a person can extrapolate from minimal sensory input but how much extrapolation is possible under different circumstances and how it is done. Dreyfus, having seen the whole of the exchange so far, agrees that both have a point but argues that Collins’s approach still misses the well established importance of bodily engagement for full understanding. Collins responds to this by trying to set out more clearly the position associated with the idea of interactional expertise. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: I analyse the case of three Japanese-Portuguese interpreters who have given support to technology transfer from a steel company in Japan to one in Brazil for more than thirty years. Their job requires them to be ‘interactional experts’ in steel-making. The Japanese–Portuguese interpreters are immersed in more than the language of steel-making as their job involves a great deal of ‘physical contiguity’ with steel-making practice. Physical contiguity undoubtedly makes the acquisition of interactional expertise easier. This draws attention to the lack of empirical work on the exact way that the physical and the linguistic interact in the acquisition of interactional expertise, or any other kind of expertise. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Interactional expertise is here to stay. Undoubtedly, in some sense of the word, one can attain a linguistic expert level within a field without full scale practical immersion. In the context of the idea of embodied cognition, the claim is provocative. How can an interactional expert acquire full linguistic competence without the simultaneous bodily engagement and real life interaction needed to get the language right? How can one understand the concept of hammering if one has never seen a hammer or felt the weight of the iron head on a fragile thumb? Here I will explore a strange and second-hand way in which bodily engagement could have an impact on our linguistic abilities; this is via the so called mirror neuron system. Since the mirror neuron system blurs the distinction between first and third person activity it can help us understand some of the enigmatic aspects of interactional expertise and pose further questions for research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The burgeoning field of studies in expertise and experience (SEE) is a useful theoretical approach to complex problems. In light of SEE, examination of the controversial and well known case study of dolphin bycatch in the US tuna fishery, reveals that effective problem-solving was hindered by institutional tensions in respect of decision-making authority and difficulties with the integration of different expertises. Comparing the profiles of four individuals, who played distinct roles in the problem-solving process, I show that (1) to address a complex problem, a suite of contributory expertises—rarely found in one individual—may be required; (2) formal credentials are not a reliable indicator of who possesses these necessary expertises; (3) interactional expertise and interactive ability are useful tools in combining the contributory expertises of others to yield a desirable collective outcome; and (4) the concepts of contributory expertise and no expertise are useful tools for understanding the actual contribution of various parties to the problem-solving process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The author claims to have developed interactional expertise in gravitational wave physics without engaging with the mathematical or quantitative aspects of the subject. Is this possible? In other words, is it possible to understand the physical world at a high enough level to argue and make judgments about it without the corresponding mathematics? This question is empirically approached in three ways: (i) anecdotes about non-mathematical physicists are presented; (ii) the author undertakes a reflective reading of a passage of physics, first without going through the maths and then after engaging with it and discusses the difference between the experiences; (iii) the aforementioned exercise gives rise to a table of Levels of Understanding of mathematics, and physicists are asked about the level mathematical understanding they applied when they last read a paper. Each phase of empirical research suggests that mathematics is not as central to gaining an understanding of physics as it is often said to be. This does not mean that mathematics is not central to physics, merely that it is not essential for every physicist to be an accomplished mathematician, and that a division of labour model is adequate. This, in turn, suggests that a stream of undergraduate physics education with fewer mathematical hurdles should be developed, making it easier to train wider groups of people in physical science comprehension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The phrase ‘trading zone’ is often used to denote any kind of interdisciplinary partnership in which two or more perspectives are combined and a new, shared language develops. In this paper we distinguish between different types of trading zone by asking whether the collaboration is co-operative or coerced and whether the end-state is a heterogeneous or homogeneous culture. In so doing, we find that the voluntary development of a new language community—what we call an inter-language trading zone—represents only one of four possible configurations. In developing this argument we show how different modes of collaboration result in different kinds of trading zone, how different kinds of trading zone may be ‘nested’ inside each other and discuss how a single collaboration might move between different kinds of trading zone over time. One implication of our analysis is that interactional expertise is a central component of at least one class of trading zone. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Programming languages are, at the same time, instruments and communicative artifacts that evolve rapidly through use. In this paper I describe an online computing platform called BioBike. BioBike is a trading zone where biologists and programmers collaborate in the development of an extended vocabulary and functionality for computational genomics. In the course of this work they develop interactional expertise with one another’s domains. The extended BioBike vocabulary operates on two planes: as a working programming language, and as a pidgin in the conversation between the biologists and engineers. The flexibility that permits this community to dynamically extend BioBike’s working vocabulary—to form new pidgins—makes BioBike unique among computational tools, which usually are not themselves adapted through the collaborations that they facilitate. Thus BioBike is itself a crucial feature—which it is tempting to refer to as a participant—in the developing interaction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: On the face of it, the directors of new large scientific projects have an impossible task. They have to make technical decisions about sciences in which they have never made a research contribution—sciences in which they have no contributory expertise. Furthermore, these decisions must be accepted and respected by the scientists who are making research contributions. The problem is discussed in two interviews conducted with two directors of large scientific projects. The paradox is resolved for the managers by their use of interactional and referred expertise. The same analysis might be applicable to management in general. An Appendix, co-authored with Jeff Shrager, compares the notion of referred expertise with contributory expertise. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: ‘Interactional expertise’ is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well socialized in the language of a specialist group is indistinguishable from those with full blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]