Of Proust’s Madeleines and Whales’ Songs: An Aesthetic Perspective on Expertise

This paper explores the overlooked role of senses in generating, applying, and recognizing expertise. Drawing from scholarly work on aesthetics, we highlight the role of aesthetic knowledge in expertise – knowledge that resides in cultivated sensory judgments that experts employ to work with and through materiality. We elaborate on three ways in which aesthetic knowledge is implicated in expertise. First, sensory judgments elicit interactions between experts, artifacts and technologies within the webs of relations in which expertise is generated. Second, as experts apply expertise to cases and problems, they produce, evaluate, and manipulate artifacts and technologies relying on their senses. Third, judgments and representations of expertise are implicated in negotiations on who is an expert and which expertise is valuable. Together, these insights suggest an understanding of expertise that accounts for sensory faculties and experience as social practices intertwined with the material environment.