Expertise represents an innovative development in the history of relativism (see relativism versus constructivism), whereby epistemic authority is claimed over a conceptually rather than physically defined domain. The locus classicus for this point is Émile Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society (1895), which defined the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity in terms of precisely this shift. The culture of expertise is usually associated with a discipline (see disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity) whose members practise in a dispersed, as opposed to a well-bounded, space. (See kuhn, popper and logical positivism for the emergence of expertise as paradigm.) “Expert”, a contraction of the participle “experienced”, first appeared as a noun in the French Third Republic, the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The first experts were called as witnesses in trials to detect handwriting forgeries. When evaluating putative forgeries, experts were not expected to exhibit their reasoning publicly. They were not casuists who weighed the relative probability that various general principles applied to the case. Rather, an expert's previous experience in successfully identifying forgeries licensed the trustworthiness of his judgement, subject to the objections of a fellow expert called to testify in a case. The mystique of expertise is created by the impression that an expert's colleagues are sufficiently scrupulous that, were it necessary, they would be able and inclined to redress any misuse or abuse of their expertise. That they do not means that the expert must be doing something right.