Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction

Humana.Mente – Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2015

There are many philosophical problems surrounding experts, given the power and status accorded to them in society. We think that what makes someone an expert is having expertise in some skill domain. But what does expertise consist in, and how closely related is expertise to the notion of an expert? In this paper I inquire into the nature of expertise, by drawing on recent psychological research on skill acquisition and expert performance. In addition, I connect this research on expertise to the larger context of psychological research on human cognition, as it will illuminate some of the differing elements of expertise. This allows me to then critique philosophical accounts of expertise, by showing how they make unwarranted assumptions about skills and expertise. Finally, I note the ways in which being credited as an expert can diverge from the possession of expertise itself. This can help us resist some of the power dynamics involved with those deemed to be experts.

Sociológia - Slovak Sociological Review, 2018

The article tackles the problem of defining and identifying experts. The conceptual analysis of what it means to be an expert relies on existing scholarship in social epistemology and sociology of expertise. It draws a portrait of experts as deeply immersed in specialist habits and practices, whose truth-tracing testimonies, publicity, and standards of inquiry bestow on them a tentative, context-dependent epistemic authority. This definition of expertise is closely connected with the question of their recognition by the lay public, i.e. how experts can (and should) signal their reliability and trustworthiness. The signaling is made possible through the culture of responsibility present in scientific practices along with the institutionalization of certain features of ‘epistemic vigilance’.

All fields of study are thought to pursue understanding of their subject matter, and most such fields are thought to have experts who are expected to possess insight into the underlying structure of knowledge within their field. Yet being an expert within one’s field usually means being an expert in a small subset of the field and often implies little about one’s expertise outside the narrow range. Worse yet, there are persuasive arguments that experts in some fields lack the abilities they claim to have. This short article will briefly sketch features that are common to experts along with mechanisms underlying expertise, provide a few findings that help underscore differences between domains, and finally confront arguments against certain types of expertise.

2020

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2019

Work in progress: Comments welcome, please do not quote without prior permission. Abstract Expertise has come under attack not least since the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump's election as President of the United States. In this contribution I will examine the historical roots of this critique, and its social context. I will ask what it could mean to speak of the rightful place of expertise. I will try to provide an answer by looking more closely at different types of expertise. Expertise, it seems, has been used as an umbrella term for a variety of different knowledge related activities. I will show that experts have to be differentiated from the role of the scientist, but also from the role of the specialist. Specialists have different tasks in comparison to experts which need to be emphasized. My argument will draw on the social and historical context of the critique of expertise, drawing upon the notion of 'civic epistemologies'.

Expertise, Communication and Organizing, 2016

Iowa State University Summer Symposium on Science Communication

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2018

This paper tackles the problem of defining what a cognitive expert is. Starting from a shared intuition that the definition of an expert depends upon the conceptual function of expertise, I shed light on two main approaches to the notion of an expert: according to novice-oriented accounts of expertise, experts need to provide laypeople with information they lack in some domain; whereas, according to research-oriented accounts, experts need to contribute to the epistemic progress of their discipline. In this paper, I defend the thesis that cognitive experts should be identified by their ability to perform the latter function rather than the former, as novice-oriented accounts, unlike research-oriented ones, fail to comply with the rules of a functionalist approach to expertise.

Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2011