C onsulting is a widely used but often misunderstood term. Some say consultants provide clients with advice or perform professional services for them, but there’s really no standard definition. We define it as a specialized professional service that provides expert advice to clients in a domain-specific field (such as IT or management). People hire consultants to diagnose, define, and solve the...

1. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) is undertaking a review of scientific evidence that bears on the Government’s dietary recommendations for infants and young children. The review will identify new evidence that has emerged since the Government’s current recommendations were formulated, and will appraise that evidence to determine whether the advice should be revised. The ...

The application of information technology can have positive and negative impacts on social capital. In this paper we discuss technologies which have the potential to foster social capital by matching human actors. The matching algorithms are based on the personal data describing the actors' behavior, background, qualification, or interests. Consequently, actors who are little known or even unkn...

Previous literature on advice-resistance in medicine and welfare has tended to focus patients’ or callers’ inexplicit resistance (minimal responses, silence so on). But clients also raise explicit objections, which put up a firmer barrier against the advisor’s efforts. In novel look at resistance, we show that one important distinction among objections is their epistemic domain: whether client’...

Establishing the expertise for rare diseases started in the Netherlands by an inventory on existing expertise in 500 rare diseases at the Dutch Medical University Centres. The outcome of this survey was a vast list of persons with special knowledge of one or several of these rare diseases. The Dutch Steering Committee on Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs concluded that differentiation within this ...

It seems to be a commonplace of the philosophical literature that there is no such thing as moral expertise. Or perhaps, more narrowly, that there is no such thing as justified deference to moral expertise, when there is moral expertise. On the other hand, a warrant for moral deference seems to have a secure place in everyday moral experience. It is illustrated, for example, by the ubiquitous p...

It is widely debated how ordinary citizens understand and use different types of knowledge whether the authority professional expertise challenged by spread information. These debates underline that we know too little about understood from citizens’ point view decide or not to accept various as authoritative. This article investigates lay willingness follow certain advice. We argue variation in...

Starting from McCarthy’s seminal proposal for the construction of an advice-taking machine, we show how tools from abstract argumentation and computational learning can help disambiguate and formalize that goal. Our focus is on establishing provable guarantees on the realizability of the advice taker, and on implementing an actual prototype system.

Among the many reasons that may limit the adoption of promising reform ideas, policy capacity is the least recognized. The concept itself is not widely understood. Although policy capacity is concerned with the gathering of information and the formulation of options for public action in the initial phases of policy consultation and development, it also touches on all stages of the policy proces...