Professor Robert Evans

Robert Evans is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. Based in the field of science and technology studies (STS), he is closely associated with the development of the ‘Third Wave’ in science studies, aka studies of expertise and experience (SEE). The SEE programme, which has been developed over the past two decades with Professor Harry Collins, has three main strands of work: a technical strand, which focuses on developing a theory of expertise based on ideas of tacit knowledge and socialisation; a methodological strand, which has developed the Imitation Game as new method for social science research; and a policy-strand, which examines how expertise in general, and scientific expertise in particular, should be valued within democratic societies as part of the wider set of checks and balances.

Further information about Robert’s research and publications is available on his Cardiff University homepage.

Robert’s work at the SOCRATES centre will aim to develop the policy strand of the SEE programme by developing the idea of ‘veritocracy’, which is intended to describe the normative vision of a democratic society in which the ideal of ‘truth’ plays a central role. This work builds on previous publications including Why Democracies Need Science (Polity Press, 2017), Experts and the Will of the People (Palgrave, 2020) and The Face-to-Face Principle (Cardiff University Press, 2022) by extending what was previously called ‘elective modernism’ to specify more precisely the role of science as repository of cultural values and a source of trustworthy knowledge that should be used to inform decision-making at all levels. Veritocracy thus provides a means through which STS scholars can resist populist and post-truth claims that science is just another self-serving opinion without having to sacrifice their disciplinary commitment to knowledge as a collective and social accomplishment.