Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction

Jamie Carlin Watson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350083837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

What does it mean to be an expert? What sort of authority do experts really have? And what role should they play in today's society? Addressing why ever larger segments of society are skeptical of what experts say, Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction reviews contemporary philosophical debates and introduces what an account of expertise needs to accomplish in order to be believed. Drawing on research from philosophers and sociologists, chapters explore widely held accounts of expertise and uncover their limitations, outlining a set of conceptual criteria a successful account of expertise should meet. By providing suggestions for how a philosophy of expertise can inform practical disciplines such as politics, religion, and applied ethics, this timely introduction to a topic of pressing importance reveals what philosophical thinking about expertise can contribute to growing concerns about experts in the 21st century.

1 THE TROUBLE WITH EXPERTS

“And this I say, lest any [person] should beguile you with enticing words.”

(Colossians 2:4, King James Version, 1611)

In this chapter, I review some contemporary difficulties with what it means to be an expert. I explore two common uses of expertise that impede efforts to develop a meaningful account of it (1.2–1.3). I then explore five cognitive and social mechanisms that have a distorting effect on whom we trust, that is, that make it easy to mis-identify experts (1.4–1.5). Whether individually or in combination, I call these distorting effects the confounding of expertise. I conclude that without a sense of what makes an expert an expert, it is difficult to combat these distorting effects and to develop strategies for trusting those who are trustworthy.

1.1 The Current State of Trust in Experts

• Your doctor tells you there’s about an 80 percent chance you have cancer.

• Reverend Gloria Copeland tells you there is no flu epidemic.

• Political analyst Thomas Friedman tells you there will soon be another economic collapse like that of 2008.

• A builder tells you she can build a basement in your new house that won’t leak.

Should you trust any of these claims? And if so, should you simply embrace them, adding them to your collection of beliefs, or should you hold them tentatively, taking them as an opportunity to look for more evidence?

These examples are not instances of simple testimony—one person’s telling another person something with the aim of being believed on the basis of that telling.¹ The speakers do not merely have information to report, like a news source or textbook. They presume to understand something you are in no position to understand. They purport to be, in an important sense, the author of their claims; they offer those claims as a judgment formed after assessing evidence and applying it to a set of complex circumstances to answer a question they think is relevant to your interests (Austin 1946). If they are, in fact, authorities, in this sense, they are not only aware of that evidence; they understand how that evidence came about, how to use it, and perhaps most importantly, how it can go wrong. And they understand all this—again, if they really do—in virtue of an ongoing, intentional relationship with that evidence; they do not possess it by accident or by memorization. The presumption is that, if they really are speaking with authority, they are doing so because they are experts.

When experts speak from their expertise, they are claiming a certain authority in their domain. But trust in claims to authority has a spotty history. Political claims to authority have been met with revolution or war. Religious claims to authority have incited … well, revolution and war. People advocating for new techniques or technologies are often regarded with suspicion. For example, in the mid-1800s, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that using a chlorine hand wash significantly reduced the spread of diseases like childbed fever. While this practice and Semmelweis’s explanation of its success were well-received in the UK, Austrian and German physicians largely dismissed them both as naïve, even attacking them as “theology” rather than science. Mary Shelley’s 1919 Frankenstein, written to lampoon uninformed distrust in innovation, also stands as a reminder of just how widespread cultural skepticism of new technologies can be and how it can shape which technologies are developed. Even today, highly educated people, people who create and innovate, are often called “elitist,” “out of touch,” or “impractical.” And those who promote special interest groups, charities, or government agencies, regardless of their credentials or experience, are often dismissed for having ulterior motives.

A few types of people, however, seem to overcome this suspicion. It is usually—Semmelweis notwithstanding—those whose claims to authority can be demonstrated to others through various types of empirical success. For example, it is often easy to tell when clothes, tools, jewelry, carts, barrels, and candles are well-made. We trust people who have made good products to continue to make good products. And even when quality is not immediately obvious, online review platforms help distribute information about tools that break, clothes that wear out quickly or fit poorly, and jewelry that falls apart. Athletes are another example of experts who easily overcome suspicion. Few people who see Hannah Teter snowboard or Alina Zagitova ice skate question their expertise in their sports.

But there are many different types of expertise, and not all types are demonstrable in the same way. Economists and political analysts, for example, are notoriously bad forecasters.² Does this mean they are not experts or that their expertise is not in forecasting? Studies of psychotherapy outcomes suggest that trained psychiatrists and psychologists are no better than minimally trained counselors with no advanced degrees (Dawes 1994: 50–63).³ Does this mean that psychiatrists are not experts or that a degree in psychiatry is not needed to be an expert counselor? Sommeliers are still widely regarded as “wine experts” despite extensive evidence that they perform no better than chance.⁴ Have we set the wrong expectations for sommeliers, or do we now have good grounds to dismiss their testimony as, at best, guessing? And many people who were once regarded as experts have been outstripped by simple prediction algorithms.⁵ Have these people lost their expertise? Did they have it in the first place?

Even in the physical sciences, which, arguably, have one of the best track records of successful discoveries, it is not easy to explain who counts as an expert and what expertise in a domain implies. On one hand, advancements in science and technology have—demonstrably and uncontroversially—helped humans (though not always other animals) live longer and better lives. If anyone fits the description of an expert, it would seem a scientist does. On the other hand, innovation is not the same as expertise. Few scientists ever make a “break-through” discovery. And many who do usually do so by accident. Wherein lies the expertise of someone who stumbles onto a single great idea, or who relies on decades of research from others before filling in the last piece that leads to discovery?

Further, whether scientists are experts because of their successes depends largely on how we define “success.” Most scientific claims throughout history have proved faulty. Each time this happened, they were replaced with more useful theories, which also subsequently proved faulty, which were then replaced with other useful theories, and so on. Novelist Terry Pratchett made this point starkly in his satire of journalism The Truth (2000), when his imminently pragmatic character Lord Vetinari mused on the vicissitudes of science:

“A thousand years ago we thought the world was a bowl,” he said. “Five hundred years ago we knew it was a globe. Today we know it is flat and round and carried through space on the back of a turtle.”⁶ He turned and gave the High Priest another smile. “Don’t you wonder what shape it will turn out to be tomorrow?” (33)

If we measure scientists’ success in terms of usefulness, science does, indeed, seem successful. But if expertise is a matter of how much experts know in their domain, it is less clear which scientists, if any, are experts.

Further still, science has helped produce some of the most gruesome horrors in human history, from mustard gas, to the atomic bomb, to experiments conducted at the expense of human suffering and lives. Even if we allow that scientists are experts, there are serious questions about the sort of authority science engenders and the sort of trust that kind of authority requires from the rest of us.

Therefore, before we tackle the difficult work of identifying experts and sorting them from non-experts, we need to have a better sense of what it means to be an expert. Taking the concept of expertise seriously requires getting a sense of what role the concept plays in our language, learning which conceptions of expertise are plausible, looking for uncontroversial examples of experts in the world and seeing if our concept captures what they are, and then testing the strengths and limitations of this concept. This is not a simple project. It requires wading through both the pessimism and the optimism to see what holds up.

I’ll start with two ways of talking about expertise that steer us away from a plausible conception of it. Then I’ll review some psychological and social mechanisms that I think contribute to misunderstandings of expertise.

1.2 Are Experts Professionals?

Economist Roger Koppl defines an expert as “anyone who gets paid to give an opinion” (2018: 38). Koppl highlights some of the current discussions about expertise, but he is concerned that most current definitions favor treating experts as having a high level of knowledge or skill in their domains and that this biases meaningful discussion. He says such conceptions presuppose that experts are reliable, which, as he aims to demonstrate in his book, Expert Failure, is largely untrue. Further, he thinks his definition expresses what experts are in contrast to other current definitions that idealize expertise and attempt to say what experts should be. His descriptive definition of expert, he argues, also encourages a moralizing expertise that often comes with normative accounts. This raises concerns about whether experts can comment on morally charged topics like climate change or genetic theories of race without impugning their own expertise. As a corrective, he says his definition “leaves it an open question whether experts are reliable or unreliable” (38).

Koppl’s definition renders expert roughly equivalent to “professional,” someone who is hired to fill a special, paid role, in this case, giving an opinion, whether in private or public life. This has the benefit of taking some of the pressure off deciding what counts as a domain of expertise—it is defined by the type of opinion needed—and it takes some pressure off the notion that credentials are evidence of expertise—they are not. For Koppl, judges who are elected by popular vote are experts even if they have no law degree, no previous experience with the law, and no knowledge of the law whatsoever (which is still possible in some states). Further, Koppl claims that his definition lets us ignore all questions about who is trustworthy, whom we should trust, and how we distinguish “real” experts from fakes. It allows us to focus solely on successes and failures. If someone hired to give an opinion gives us a bad one, then we can respond to that failure rather than worrying whether the person was an expert in the first place. This definition also makes it easy for Koppl to argue that experts fail. If people hired to give an opinion are experts, and those people fail to give good advice, then experts fail.

To be sure, many professions, like medieval guilds, have instituted gate-keeping mechanisms for ensuring at least some degree of competence in their domains: education requirements, experience requirements, certifications, references, and so on. But Koppl does not require this for his definition. If you hire your eighteen-year-old nephew to advise your business manager on how to do the business’s taxes, your nephew is now an expert on business tax. This example shows that not all professionals are experts and not all experts are professionals, and it is a mistake to conflate them.

Koppl’s central argument for his definition is that, if we define people according to their competence, then we are committed to the notion that everyone is an expert. This is because everyone has privileged knowledge of their corner of the world, which gives them authority on that knowledge, and, thereby, makes them an expert on that perspective. But, if everyone is an expert, then no one is an expert (2019).

A moment’s reflection shows that this argument is faulty. If we put ten doctors in a room, each of whom has expertise in a different subspecialty—cardiology, orthopedics, neurology, and so on—would we say, “Well, look, everyone in here is an expert, so no one is an expert”? Clearly not. What if everyone in the room were an expert in the same domain? Would that mean there were no experts in the room? That’s not obvious, either. If everyone in the world took the time to study the piano, and everyone in the world became as good as any master pianist (set aside the empirical implausibility of this), it would not be meaningful to say that no one can play the piano very well. If this is right, then the claim, “if everyone is an expert, then no one is,” is false.

In addition to losing this central motive for his definition, Koppl’s use of the term expertise is muddy. He agrees with most accounts of expertise that “experts have knowledge not possessed by others” (23) and that “different people know different things, and no one can acquire a reasonable command of the many different fields of knowledge required to make good decisions in all the various domains of ordinary life” (23). But then he says, “There is perfect moral, epistemic, and cognitive parity between experts and nonexperts” (37). His basis for saying this seems to be the assumption that non-experts need no special help in assessing the claims of experts, that is, he thinks it resolves what philosophers have called the “recognition problem” for expertise. Yet, imagine our ten doctors again. Would we say that the cardiologist’s advice is no better than the neurologist’s even if the question is about heart disease? In the process of making expertise more manageable, he’s eliminated any substantive difference between experts and non-experts.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Koppl’s definition is that it doesn’t actually eliminate the question of who is highly competent in a domain, it just pushes that question onto the person who hires them. Even if Koppl isn’t concerned about who actually knows something in a domain, the person who hires them certainly should be. Even though experts often give the wrong opinions, when they give the right opinion, experts (real experts, that is) give them for the right reasons. It is no accident that a doctor can distinguish one type of cancer from another, whereas a novice cannot. It is no surprise that an expert musician makes fewer mistakes over time on a complicated piece of music than a novice who happens to know how to play that piece. In conflating professionalism with competence, Koppl draws an unwarrantedly skeptical conclusion about experts generally.

To be sure, Koppl may not want to use the term “expert” for those highly competent in a domain, but that seems like an arbitrary choice. Would he prefer to the term “specialized competence”? If so, then that’s what this book is about. Mainly because that is what people care about when they have talked about expertise since ancient Greece.

Koppl’s misuse of expert highlights the confusion that’s possible when we are only concerned with one aspect of a concept. For Koppl, this is how to mitigate error in the use of science in finance and public policy. Yet, Koppl could use the term “professional” instead of “expert” and get more from his argument, and he would also avoid denuding the very different concept of expertise of its historical, intuitive, and colloquial underpinnings.

1.3 Is Expertise Dying?

Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs, believes expert skepticism is growing in unprecedented ways. He argues that the problem has grown from mere widespread ignorance among citizens—which he admits has always been a problem—to “positive hostility” toward those we traditionally think of as experts and toward what those experts regard as “established knowledge.” This positive hostility, Nichols argues, is leading to a social catastrophe he calls the “death of expertise” (2017: 20).

What does Nichols mean by “expert”? “Experts are people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us, and are those to whom we turn when we need advice, education, or solutions in a particular area of human knowledge” (29). This definition suggests that someone is only an expert if they know more than others, but Nichols does allow that experts can rely on one another, too. And as Nichols describes experts, it becomes clear that he doesn’t think expertise is solely about relative knowledge; “true expertise,” he says, “is a combination of education, talent, experience, and peer affirmation” (30). Importantly for his central thesis, Nichols does treat expertise as an objective phenomenon. Even...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface: The Big Questions about Expertise
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Trouble with Experts
• 2 Philosophical Approaches to Expertise
• 3 Truth-Based Accounts of Expertise
• 4 Performance-Based Accounts of Expertise—Part 1
• 5 Performance-Based Accounts of Expertise—Part 2
• 6 Social Role Accounts of Expertise
• 7 The Cognitive Systems Account of Expertise
• Notes
• References and Further Reading
• Index
• Imprint