The so-called expertise defence against sceptical challenges from experimental philosophy has recently come under attack: there are several studies claiming to have found direct evidence that philosophers’ judgments in thought experiments are susceptible to erroneous effects. In this paper, we distinguish between the customary ‘immune experts’ version of the expertise defence and an ‘informed experts’ version. On the informed expertise defence, we argue, philosophers’ judgments in thought experiments could be preferable to those by the folk even if it were true (...) that philosophers’ judgments are no less immune to confounders than judgments by the folk are. We present results from an experimental study comparing philosophers and non-philosophers (n = 484), which support this version of the expertise defence. (shrink)

L’expertise se trouve bien souvent au cœur des dossiers judiciaires relatifs à la responsabilité en matière de santé publique. L’expert est chargé de reconstituer les faits ou d’évaluer le travail de ses collègues agissant comme conseillers des décideurs, pour établir si la qualité de l’expertise et du conseil a été à la hauteur des enjeux sanitaires. En France, les experts judiciaires ont un statut officiel à l’issue d’un processus réglementé et de contrôles spécifiques réguliers. Si cette procédure permet d’identifier clairement (...) les compétences des experts agréés, elle rend difficile, par sa lourdeur, l’accès des chercheurs à ce statut. Par ailleurs, des procédures plus claires permettant de séparer expertise et lobby devraient être mises en place.Expert appraisals are often crucial in legal proceedings concerning liability in matters of public health. Experts are required to reconstruct facts or to appraise the work of colleagues who act in an advisory capacity to policy-makers, in order to establish whether the quality of the expert studies and advice provided have been adequate to the importance of the health issues. In France, expert witnesses have an official status subject to a regulated procedure that includes specific and regular audits. Although this procedure clearly identifies the competences of court-appointed experts, it is far too lengthy and cumbersome for researchers to gain access to this status. Clearer procedures capable of distinguishing expert appraisals from lobbying also need to be established. (shrink)

_Expertise, Pedagogy and Practice_ takes as its focus recent work on situated and embodied cognition, the concepts of expertise, skill and practice, and contemporary pedagogical theory. This work has made important steps towards overcoming traditional intellectualist and individualist models of cognition, group interaction and learning, but has in turn generated a number of important questions about the shape of a model that emphasizes learning and interaction as situated and embodied. Bringing together philosophers, cognitive scientists and education theorists, the collection asks (...) and explores a variety of different questions. Can a group learn? Is expertise distributed? How can we make sense of a normative dimension of expertise or skill? How situation-specific is expertise? How can groups shape or generate expert practice? Through these lenses, this collection advances a more experientially holistic approach to the characterisation and growth of human expertise. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Educational Philosophy and Theory. _. (shrink)

Champions of the methodological movement of experimental philosophy have challenged the long-standing practice of relying on intuitive verdicts on cases in philosophical inquiry. They argue that th...

One of the dominant behavioral markers of visual-expert search strategy, Holistic Visual Processing (HVP), suggests that experts process information from a larger region of space in conjunction with a more focused gaze pattern in order to improve search speed and accuracy. To date, extant literature suggests that visual search expertise is domain specific, including HVP and its associated behaviors. The current study is the first to use eye tracking to directly measure the HVP strategies of two expert groups, radiologists and (...) architects, in comparison to one another and a novice control. In doing so, we replicated and extended this prior research: visual expertise is domain specific. However, our eye tracking data indicate that contrary to this prior work, HVP strategies are transferable across domains. Yet, despite the transfer of HVP strategies, there is neither reduced search time nor greater accuracy in visual search outside of an expert’s domain. Therefore, our data suggest that HVP behaviors are a particular form of visual search mechanism that, outside of an expert’s native search-ecology, are not necessarily conducive to more general visual search success. It is in addition to explicit knowledge of an expert’s domain, how to search, and where to search, that HVP strategies are their most effective for visual search success. (shrink)

Based on various stimuli, the findings for the inattentional blindness paradigm suggest that many observers do not perceive an unexpected object in a dynamic setting. In a first experiment, inattentional blindness was combined with eye tracking data from children. Observers who did not notice the unexpected object in the basketball game test by Simons and Chabris spent on average as much time looking at the unexpected object as those subjects who did perceive it. As such, individual differences that are responsible (...) for the recognition of unexpected objects have to be found as further indicators. In a second experiment, the expert-novice paradigm was used to show that the probability of seeing an unexpected object can be increased with specific previous experience. The results in the same task indicate significant differences between basketball experts and basketball novices. The ages of the subjects in both experiments are discussed in connection with the inattentional blindness paradigm. (shrink)

Skepticism about ethical expertise has grown common, raising concerns that bioethicists’ roles are inappropriate or depend on something other than expertise in ethics. While these roles may depend on skills other than those of expertise, overlooking the role of expertise in ethics distorts our conception of moral advising. This paper argues that motivations to reject ethical expertise often stem from concerns about elitism: either an intellectualist elitism, where some privileged elite have supposedly special access in virtue of expertise in moral (...) theory; or an authoritarian elitism, where our reliance on experts in ethics risks violation of autonomy and democracy. The paper sketches an anti-elitist conception of ethics expertise in bioethics as continuous with an anti-elitist conception of ethics expertise in common moral practice, undercutting the intellectualism, and then uses this anti-elitist conception to reject arguments that ethical expertise violates autonomy or democracy. An anti-elitist picture of ethical expertise both renders it consistent with our general moral practice and allows us to resist skeptical concerns. (shrink)

Abstract: Some proponents of “experimental philosophy” criticize philosophers' use of thought experiments on the basis of evidence that the verdicts vary with truth-independent factors. However, their data concern the verdicts of philosophically untrained subjects. According to the expertise defence, what matters are the verdicts of trained philosophers, who are more likely to pay careful attention to the details of the scenario and track their relevance. In a recent article, Jonathan M. Weinberg and others reply to the expertise defence that there (...) is no evidence for such expertise. They now receive a reply in this article, which argues that they have misconstrued the dialectical situation. Since they have produced no evidence that philosophical training is less efficacious for thought experimentation than for other cognitive tasks for which they acknowledge that it produces genuine expertise, such as informal argumentation, they have produced no evidence for treating the former more sceptically than the latter. (shrink)

With the rapid development of genetic research and applications in health care there is some agreement among funding and regulatory bodies that the public(s) need to be equipped to deal with the choices that the new technologies will offer them, although this does not necessarily include a role for the public in influencing their development and regulation. This paper considers the methods and purpose of public consultations in the area of genetics including large-scale surveys of opinion, consensus conferences and focus (...) groups. Consultation has been undertaken to enable the researchers/policy makers to see what the public do not know and plan more public education to make up the deficiency, to check on areas of concern so that public education can be used to address them or to gain a public mandate for a planned policy. An alternative and more recent approach is to find out what the public(s) do know and understand and to see how experts can learn from them in order to get a fuller view of technology in use. (shrink)

In what sense, if any, are philosophers experts in their domain of research and what could philosophical expertise be? The above questions are particularly pressing given recent methodological disputes in philosophy. The so-called expertise defense recently proposed as a reply to experimental philosophers postulates that philosophers are experts qua having improved intuitions. However, this model of philosophical expertise has been challenged by studies suggesting that philosophers’ intuitions are no less prone to biases and distortions than intuitions of non-philosophers. Should we (...) then give up on the idea that philosophers possess some sort of expertise? In this paper, I argue that instead of focusing on intuitions, we may understand the relevant results of philosophical practice more broadly and investigate the other kind of expertise they would require. My proposal is inspired by a prominent approach to investigating expert performance from psychology and suggests where and how to look for expertise in the results characteristic of philosophical practice. In developing this model, I discuss the following three candidates for such results: arguments, theories, and distinctions. Whether philosophers could be shown to be expert intuiters or not, there are interesting domains where we could look for philosophical expertise, beyond intuitions. (shrink)

This paper argues that the problem of expertise calls for a rapprochement between social epistemology and argumentation theory. Social epistemology has tended to emphasise the role of expert testimony, neglecting the argumentative function of appeals to expert opinion by non-experts. The first half of the paper discusses parallels and contrasts between the two cases of direct expert testimony and appeals to expert opinion by our epistemic peers, respectively. Importantly, appeals to expert opinion need to be advertised as such, if they (...) are to sway an epistemic peer. The second half of the paper sketches a theoretical framework for thinking about assessments of expertise in a unified way, via a ‘default and challenge’ model that emphasises the need for a version of conversational scorekeeping. It is through such scorekeeping that interlocutors can track and coordinate their differences in epistemic outlook. The paper concludes with a genealogical perspective on the function of (attributions of) expertise: acceptance of another’s appeal to expert opinion may be construed as tacit agreement that inquiry, for now, has been taken far enough. (shrink)

L’Inra a mis en place en 2002 une activité d’expertise scientifique collective dans ses domaines de compétences – agriculture, environnement, alimentation – pour répondre à des questions d’action publique, portées principalement par les ministères de l’agriculture et de l’écologie. C’est sur la base de l’expérience acquise qu’ont été formulés les principes qui encadrent l’exercice et qui figurent dans la charte de l’expertise scientifique à l’Inra, et qu’on été construites les procédures de conduite qui en garantissent la qualité. Cet article s’attache (...) à la phase initiale du processus, déterminante pour la pertinence du travail, consacrée à l’instruction de la question d’expertise et à sa traduction de la sphère de l’action à celle de la recherche. Pour les experts, il s’agit de saisir le contexte, les enjeux, la logique de la commande, et pour les décideurs, de comprendre ce qu’ils peuvent attendre de la démarche d’analyse et d’assemblage des connaissances dans les limites de temps assignées à l’exercice.In 2002, Inra included collective expert scientific studies in its areas of competence – agriculture, environment and food – in response to public policy issues mainly arising in the Ministries of Agriculture and Ecology. The governing principles of the exercise, set out in Inra’s Charter on expert scientific studies, were formulated on the basis of prior experience, as were the procedures built up to guarantee the quality of the studies. This article describes on the first phase of the process, which is decisive in terms of the relevance of the work undertaken. For the experts, the task requires an understanding of the context, the issues and the reasons for the request, while the decision-makers have to understand what they can expect from an approach that sets out to analyse and compile knowledge within the time allotted to the exercise. (shrink)

One of the most influential studies in all expertise research is de Groot’s (1946) study of chess players, which suggested that pattern recognition, rather than search, was the key determinant of expertise. Many changes have occurred in the chess world since de Groot’s study, leading some authors to argue that the cognitive mechanisms underlying expertise have also changed. We decided to replicate de Groot’s study to empirically test these claims and to examine whether the trends in the data have changed (...) over time. Six Grandmasters, five International Masters, six Experts, and five Class A players completed the think-aloud procedure for two chess positions. Findings indicate that Grandmasters and International Masters search more quickly than Experts and Class A players, and that both groups today search substantially faster than players in previous studies. The findings, however, support de Groot’s overall conclusions and are consistent with predictions made by pattern recognition models. (shrink)

We examined the effects of order of presentation on the moral judgments of professional philosophers and two comparison groups. All groups showed similar-sized order effects on their judgments about hypothetical moral scenarios targeting the doctrine of the double effect, the action-omission distinction, and the principle of moral luck. Philosophers' endorsements of related general moral principles were also substantially influenced by the order in which the hypothetical scenarios had previously been presented. Thus, philosophical expertise does not appear to enhance the stability (...) of moral judgments against this presumably unwanted source of bias, even given familiar types of cases and principles. (shrink)

In recent years a new discussion on the nature of philosophical expertise has emerged: whether philosophers possess a special kind of expertise, what such expertise would entail, how to measure it, and related concerns. The aim of the present article is to clarify certain related points across these debates in the hope of paving a clearer path forward, by addressing the following. (1) The expertise defense, which seems central to many discussions on methodology and expertise, has been misconstrued at times. (...) (2) Questions of expertise and methodology could be separated more clearly. (3) The study of expertise may be important in its own right; however, there may be good reasons to give priority to methodological concerns. (4) Finally, when viewed in light of methodological concerns, a new project emerges when engaging with recent contributions to the expertise debate. The present article attempts a brief outline of this project. (shrink)

Any conceptual investigation into a given phenomenon may fail in several ways. It may be, for instance, inconsistent, too inclusive or exclusive, or even materially inappropriate. In a recent reply, Michel Croce raises all of these objections to what I have called a “balanced account of expertise” (2018). First, he claims there is a “compromising tension” between two basic components of my account (cf. sect. 3.1). This would be the charge of inconsistency, as Croce states, “Quast cannot have his cake (...) and eat it too” (Croce 2019, 29). Second, he finds my proposal too exclusive (cf. sect. 3.2), because in his view a number of intuitive experts do not fulfill the proposed characteristics. And, third, Croce claims that two characteristics of my account should be kept apart and define different kinds of expertise rather than expertise as such (cf. sect. 3.3). This would be the charge of material inappropriateness. The aim of this article is to answer these charges. More exactly, I attempt to demonstrate that these objections are flawed because they are based on an inadequate understanding of the framework I proposed. I will concentrate on these main objections. (shrink)

Trust is a central concept in the philosophy of science. We highlight how trust is important in the wide variety of interactions between science and society. We claim that examining and clarifying the nature and role of trust (and distrust) in relations between science and society is one principal way in which the philosophy of science is socially relevant. We argue that philosophers of science should extend their efforts to develop normative conceptions of trust that can serve to facilitate trust (...) between scientific experts and ordinary citizens. The first project is the development of a rich normative theory of expertise and experience that can explain why the various epistemic insights of diverse actors should be trusted in certain contexts and how credibility deficits can be bridged. The second project is the development of concepts that explain why, in certain cases, ordinary citizens may distrust science, which should inform how philosophers of science conceive of the formulation of science policy when conditions of distrust prevail. The third project is the analysis of cases of successful relations of trust between scientists and non-scientists that leads to understanding better how ‘postnormal’ science interactions are possible using trust. (shrink)

We sometimes seek expert guidance when we don’t know what to think or do about a problem. In challenging cases concerning medical ethics, we may seek a clinical ethics consultation for guidance. The assumption is that the bioethicist, as an expert on ethical issues, has knowledge and skills that can help us better think about the problem and improve our understanding of what to do regarding the issue. The widespread practice of ethics consultations raises these questions and more: What would (...) it take to be a moral expert? -/- Is anyone a moral expert, and if so, how could a non-expert identify one? -/- Is it in any way problematic to accept and follow the advice of a moral expert as opposed to coming to moral conclusions on your own? -/- What should we think and do when moral experts disagree about a practical ethical issue? In what follows, we address these theoretical and practical questions about moral expertise. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Bioethics, Bernard Gesang asks whether a moral philosopher possesses greater moral expertise than a non-philosopher, and his answer is a qualified yes, based not so much on his infallible access to the truth, but on the quality of his theoretically-informed moral justifications. I reject Gesang's claim that there is such a thing as moral expertise, although the moral philosopher may well make a valid contribution to the ethics committee as a concerned and educated citizen. I (...) suggest that wisdom is a lot more interesting to examine than moral expertise. Again, however, moral philosophers have no monopoly on wisdom, and the study of philosophy may even impede its cultivation. (shrink)

This essay extends the observations made in E. Johanna Hartelius’ The rhetoric of expertise about the nature of expertise in digital contexts. I argue that digital media introduce a scale of communication—many-to-many—that reshapes how the invention of knowledge occurs. By examining how knowledge production on Wikipedia occurs, I illustrate how many-to-many communication introduces a new model of “participatory expertise.” This model of participatory expertise challenges traditional information routines by elevating procedural expertise over subject matter expertise and opening up knowledge production (...) to the many. Additionally, by hosting multiperspectival conversations on Wikipedia, the participatory model of expertise introduces epistemic turbulence into traditionally tranquil encyclopedia culture. (shrink)

Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine smells and tastes because they have learned the ability, or whether they are better imaginers in the first place, and so become experts. To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of (...) wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain‐specific effect of expertise. Critically, in a second study, we followed a group of students commencing a wine course and a group of matched control participants. Students and controls did not differ before the course, but after the wine course students reported more vivid wine imagery. We provide evidence that expertise improves imagery, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 51-67.

Acquiring expertise in a task is often thought of as an automatic process that follows inevitably with practice according to the log‐log law (aka: power law) of learning. However, as Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980) showed, this is not true for digit‐span experts and, as we show, it is certainly not true for Tetris players at any level of expertise. Although some people may simply “twitch” faster than others, the limit to Tetris expertise is not raw keypress time but the (...) techniques acquired by players that allow them to use the tools provided by the hardware and software to compensate for the game's relentlessly increasing drop speed. Unfortunately, these increases in drop speed between Tetris levels make performance plateaus very short and quickly followed by game death. Hence, a player's success at discovering, exploring, and practicing new techniques for the tasks of board preparation, board maintenance, optimal placement discovery, zoid rotation, lateral movement of zoids, and other tasks important to expertise in Tetris is limited. In this paper, we analyze data collected from 492 Tetris players to reveal the challenges they confronted while constructing expertise via the discovery of new techniques for gameplay at increasingly difficult levels of Tetris. (shrink)

Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular and malleable (...) architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives. (shrink)

Philosophical expertise consists in knowledge, but it is controversial what this knowledge consists in. I focus on three issues: the extent and nature of knowledge of philosophical truths, how this philosophical knowledge is related to philosophical progress, and skeptical challenges to philosophical knowledge.

Christian Quast has presented what he describes as a ‘role-functional’ account of expertise as a form of knowledge that purports to take into account prior discussions within recent analytic social epistemology and allied fields. I argue that his scrupulousness results in a confused version of the role-functional account, which I try to remedy by presenting a ‘clean’ account that clearly distinguishes such an account from what Quast calls a ‘competence-driven’ one. The key point of my account is that ‘competence’ pertains (...) to knowledge in closed systems and ‘expertise’ in open systems. I observe that the invocation of ‘reliability’ as an epistemic standard simply serves to confuse the difference between the competence-driven and role-functional accounts. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that experts’ semantic intuitions are more reliable and provide better evidence than lay people’s intuitions—a thesis commonly called “the Expertise Defense.” Focusing on the intuitions about the reference of proper names, this article critically assesses the Expertise Defense.

People generally develop some degree of competence in general informal reasoning and argument skills, but how do they go beyond this to attain higher expertise? Ericsson has proposed that high-level expertise in a variety of domains is cultivated through a specific type of practice, referred to as ‘deliberate practice’. Applying this framework yields the empirical hypothesis that high-level expertise in informal reasoning is the outcome of extensive deliberate practice. This paper reports results from two studies evaluating the hypothesis. University student (...) participants completed 12 weeks of deliberate practice in informal reasoning. Quantity of practice was recorded by computer, and additionally assessed via self report. The hypothesis was supported: students in both studies showed a large improvement, and practice as measured by computer, was related to amount of improvement in informal reasoning. These findings support adopting a deliberate practice approach when attempting to teach or learn expertise in informal reasoning. (shrink)

The language of ethics expertise has become particularly important in bioethics in light of efforts to establish the value of the clinical ethics consultation, to specify who is qualified to function as a clinical ethics consultant, and to characterize how one should evaluate whether or not a person is so qualified. Supporters and skeptics about the possibility of ethics expertise use the language of ethics expertise in ways that reflect competing views about what ethics expertise entails. We argue for clarity (...) in understanding the nature of expertise and ethics expertise. To be an ethics expert, we argue, is to be an expert in knowing what ought to be done. Any attempt to articulate expertise with respect to knowing what ought to be done must include an account of ethics that specifies the nature of moral truth and the means by which we access this truth or a theoretical account of ethics such that expertise in another domain is linked to knowing or being better at judging what ought to be done and the standards by which this “knowing” or “being better at judging” is determined. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for the literature on ethics expertise in CEC. We do think that there are clear domains in which a clinical ethics consultant might be expert but we are skeptical about the possibility that this includes ethics expertise. Clinical ethics consultants should not be referred to as ethics experts. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...) intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

Rather than ask if expertise is under threat, this paper uses case studies to show how expertise is enabled. Its appearance can be traced to how the already known evokes sensibility, judging, thinking and languaging. As defined below, it draws on epistemic cycles. Using Secchi and Cowley’s (2021) 3M model, this posits a second cut between the micro and the macro. In the mesosphere, people create temporary domains or what William James (1991) calls ‘little worlds’. Within these corpora popularia, the (...) new is made possible – expertise sets off unimagined outcomes. Thus, many concerns cannot be solved by scientific correlates of a natural ontological attitude: indeed, the truism clarifies many social challenges. We lack social institutions that dedicate expertise to goals like ecosocial justice and life-sustaining relations. Once the necessary expertise is traced to epistemic cycles, we can demand of institutions that they create bodies that seek to bring a rich future to evolution. (shrink)

La question des relations entre expertise scientifique, société et politique est fondamentalement communicationnelle. Souvent présenté comme univoque et incontestable, l’avis des experts ne fait pas taire les controverses. Il est élaboré dans le cadre de relations toujours incertaines, mobilisant les multiples parties prenantes de l’objet de l’expertise dans une situation sociale. Les connaissances qui en résultent constituent, quelque part, des récits qui relèvent de multiples interprétations et recadrages traduisant des logiques d’action hétérogènes, des intérêts économiques et politiques contradictoires, des tensions (...) et des conflits. Ce mouvement s’opère en lien étroit avec les médias et réseaux, au travers desquels les résultats de l’expertise sont diffusés, et de plus en plus souvent discutés.The question of relationships between scientific expertise, society and politics fundamentally revolves around communication. Though often presented as unequivocal and indisputable, expert scientific opinions do not put an end to controversy. They are developed in the context of relationships that are always uncertain, involve many different stakeholders with an interest in the object of the controversy and exist in a social situation. The resulting knowledge shapes narratives that can be interpreted and framed in many different ways, each reflecting different reasons for action, conflicting economic and political interests, tensions or disputes. This process takes place in close conjunction with the activities of the media and networks, through which expert conclusions are broadcast and increasingly debated. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...) notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence. (shrink)

Judging the warrant of conspiracy theories can be difficult, and often we rely upon what the experts tell us when it comes to assessing whether particular conspiracy theories ought to be believed. However, whereas there are recognised experts in the sciences, I argue that only are is no such associated expertise when it comes to the things we call `conspiracy theories,' but that the conspiracy theorist has good reason to be suspicious of the role of expert endorsements when it comes (...) to conspiracy theories and their rivals. The kind of expertise, then, we might associate with conspiracy theories is largely improvised—in that it lacks institutional features—and, I argue, ideally the product of a community of inquiry. (shrink)

Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical research on perceptual expertise: Perceptual expertise is genuinely perceptual (...) and genuinely cognitive, and this phenomenon reveals how we can become epistemically better perceivers. These claims are defended against sceptical opponents that deny significant top-down or cognitive effects on perception, and opponents who maintain that any such effects on perception are epistemically pernicious. (shrink)

According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive experimental study of intuitive expertise in ethics to date, which tests five well- known biases of (...) judgment and decision-making among expert ethicists and laypeople. We found that even expert ethicists are affected by some of these biases, but also that they enjoy a slight advantage over laypeople in some cases. We discuss the implications of these results for the expertise defence, and conclude that they still do not support the defence as it is typically presented in (moral) philosophy. (shrink)

The notion of moral expertise poses a variety of challenges concerning both the question of existence of such experts and their identification by laypeople. I argue for a view of ethics expertise, based on moral understanding instead of on moral knowledge, that is less robust than genuine moral expertise and that does not rely on deference to testimony. I propose identification criteria that focus mainly on the awareness and communication of implicit biases and situated ignorance. According to the account of (...) ethics expertise presented in this paper, the expert's testimony is not an epistemic reason for the layperson's belief, but merely an epistemic influence. The epistemic reasons for the layperson's belief are largely independent from the expert. But there is still some epistemic risk involved in the proposed method of knowledge transfer, and therefore criteria for the identification of a trustworthy expert are necessary. The risk involved in knowledge transfer can be both due to willful manipulation and due to the expert's implicit biases and situated ignorance. While willful manipulation cannot really be avoided, the influence from biases and ignorance can be minimized. I argue that the best way to do this is if the expert is aware of their own biases and ignorance and communicates them. Combined with evidence of the expert's education in moral philosophy and experience with the topic in question, this gives the layperson the best chance to identify someone who can really help them consider all relevant aspects of a situation and come to a better justified decision. (shrink)