This paper reports a psychological study of human categorization that looked at the procedures used by expert scientists when dealing with puzzling items. Five professional botanists were asked to specify a category from a set of positive and negative instances. The target category in the study was defined by a feature that was unusual, hence situations of uncertainty and puzzlement were generated. Subjects were asked to think aloud while solving the tasks, and their verbal reports were analyzed. A number of (...) problem solving strategies were identified, and subsequently integrated in a model of knowledge‐guided inductive categorization. Our model proposes that expert knowledge influences the subjects' reasoning in more complex ways than suggested by earlier investigations of scientific reasoning. As in previous studies, domain knowledge influenced our subjects' hypothesis generation and testing; but, additionally, it played a central role when subjects revised their hypotheses. (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)

This essay compares two philosophical proposals concerning the relation between values and science, both of which reject the value-free ideal but nevertheless place restrictions on how values and science should interact. The first of these proposals relies on a distinction between the direct and indirect roles of values, while the second emphasizes instead a distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values. We consider these two proposals in connection with a case study of disputed research on the topic of environmental justice and (...) argue that the second proposal has several advantages over the first. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue of Diametros devoted to discussing “Expertise, Disagreement, and Trust in Vaccine Science and Policy. The Importance of Transparency in a World of Experts” by Alberto Giubilini, Rachel Gur-Arie, and Euzebiusz Jamrozik. In their article, Giubilini et al. argue that expert transparency—particularly regarding disagreements among experts—is ethically crucial for securing public trust in vaccine policy. Several contributors to this issue expand upon that claim. For example, Maciej Macuga proposes that transparency is necessary to make (...) coercive vaccination policies morally legitimate, and Lucie White interprets the core disagreement surrounding vaccine recommendations as a divergence in underlying values. Other authors challenge aspects of Giubilini et al.’s position: Udo Schüklenk and Ben Almassi caution that greater transparency may not bolster trust or improve vaccine uptake, while Ezio Di Nucci presents an analytical argument showing that a purely epistemic notion of expertise leads to paradoxical conclusions—namely, that experts should care neither about trustworthiness, nor trust. Jamie Watson emphasizes that it is the reliable process of producing scientific knowledge that grounds expert trustworthiness. Finally, Elena Popa and Richard Matthews argue that redistributions of power, both in society at large and within expert communities, are necessary to foster genuine trust. (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)

The philosophical method is critical to ethics consulting. To be truly effective, ethicists need grounding in ethics theory, abstract reasoning and conceptual analysis. A Practical Guide to Clinical Ethics Consulting allows ethicists to understand problems from practitioners' points-of-view, and allows for a genuine appreciation of the working life of practitioners.

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)

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)

Dans cet essai, je compte me concentrer sur certains aspects épistémologiques de l’expertise car le risque engendre de nouveaux et difficiles défis dans ce domaine. Ma question sera d’identifier et de circonscrire des facteurs qui diminuent la confiance qu’un agent cognitif pourrait avoir envers un expert et ce, en contexte de risque. Ceci n’exclut bien sûr pas que d’autres aspects (par exemple sociaux et politiques) soient importants et je renvoie le lecteur à la vaste littérature sur le sujet. De (...) manière concrète, je mettrai en évidence comment la question du risque accentue le problème du rôle des valeurs contextuelles en épistémologie. Pour ce faire, dans la première section, je compte brièvement expliquer comment l’expertise scientifique implique une forme aigüe du problème de la connaissance par témoignage. Dans la deuxième section, j’exposerai comment la notion de risque introduit le problème des valeurs non-épistémiques en science et ce, de deux façons : par l’évaluation et la valorisation. La troisième section sera consacrée à exposer quelques approches pour sauvegarder l’intégrité et la crédibilité de l’expertise scientifique en contexte de risque. (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.

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.

Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the bodies (...) of its members but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word. (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)

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)

In this article, I assess the position that voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide ought not to be accepted in the cases of persons who suffer existentially but who have no medical condition, because existential questions do not fall within the domain of physicians’ professional expertise. I maintain that VE and PAS based on suffering arising from medical conditions involves existential issues relevantly similar to those confronted in connection with existential suffering. On that basis I conclude that if VE and (...) PAS based on suffering arising from medical conditions is taken to fall within the domain of medical expertise, it is not consistent to use the view that physicians’ professional expertise does not extend to existential questions as a reason for denying requests for VE and PAS from persons who suffer existentially but have no medical condition. (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)

This essay offers a critical examination of two recent Holocaust films that exemplify contrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s 1997 The maelstrom: A family chronicle and Quentin tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds. One film is historical; the other translates history to figurative exaggeration. The essay explores how The maelstrom positions viewers within the constructed subjunctive spaces of the film, while Inglourious basterds positions viewers as spectators of history as comic book. Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical claims to (...) expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust memory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysis reveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cinematic memory construction of the Holocaust. (shrink)

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)

This brief essay explores how understanding the treatment of expert evidence requires engaging with its legal and political contexts, and not just focusing on its epistemological aspects. Although the law of evidence and thus its treatment of experts is significantly informed by epistemological considerations, it is also informed by concerns over the organization of trials, larger issues of intelligent governance, social concerns, and enforcement issues. These five aspects to the law of evidence give rise to principles to guide the explicit (...) structuring of the law of evidence that are identified here as well. This complexity helps to explain why the central issue of expert testimony is not the epistemological one of knowledge and belief but instead the conflict between educational and deferential modes of trial. (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)

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)

This paper offers a sizeable menu of approaches to what it means to be an expert. Is it a matter of reputation within a community, or a matter of what one knows independently of reputation? An initial proposal characterizes expertise in dispositional terms—an ability to help other people get answers to difficult questions or execute difficult tasks. What cognitive states, however, ground these abilities? Do the grounds consist in “veritistic” states or in terms of evidence or justifiedness? To what (...) extent is expertise a matter of superior knowledge or other factors? Some authors seek to debunk the notion of expertise entirely. The present approach resists this stance, but doesn’t dispute the variability and fluidness of the concept. Even more challenging is the problem of how laypersons can determine who is the superior expert, especially when experts disagree. (shrink)

In contemporary dance, experts evaluate creativity in competitions, auditions, and performances, typically through ratings of choreography or improvisation. Audiences also implicitly evaluate choreographic creativity, so dancers’ livelihoods also hinge upon the opinions of non-expert observers. However, some argue that the abstract and often pedestrian nature of contemporary dance confuses non-expert audiences. Therefore, agreement regarding creativity and appreciation amongst experts and non-experts may be low. Finding appropriate methodologies for reliable and real-world creativity evaluation remains the subject of considerable debate within the (...) psychology creativity research field. Although considerably variant in methodological operationalisation, the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) asks individuals to use an implicit definition to assess creativity in others’ work. This study aimed to investigate the role of experience and expertise in the evaluation of choreographic creativity, with a secondary aim of testing the feasibility of an online snowballing methodology for large-scale dance-specific research, informed by the methodology of the CAT. We filmed 23 Contemporary Dance students each performing a 3-min peer-choreographed solo and then recruited 850 online evaluators with varying degrees of expertise and experience in dance and creativity. Evaluators viewed at least one randomly selected video and rated creativity, technical ability, appreciation and understanding of the work, each using a seven-point Likert scale. A one-way ANOVA showed a significant difference in creativity ratings across the 23 videos, and creativity correlated significantly with the other variables. We then categorized evaluators on nine aspects of their dance and creative experience and entered the data into a repeated-measures linear mixed model. Two of the fixed effects yielded differences in creativity evaluations: (i) contemporary choreographic experience and (ii) self-reported creative expertise, as did the random effect of the video. The results indicate that personal experience of the choreographic process impacts creativity assessment, above and beyond experience in dance class participation. Implications for creativity assessment within creativity research and practice are discussed. (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)

Disclosing unpublished research findings to participants during an ongoing clinical study requires careful consideration. As researchers, we are obliged to provide study participants with informati...

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)

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)

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)

Aesthetic Expertise, Ole Martin Skilleås explains what aesthetic expertise is, what it's used for, how it manifests across diverse roles within aesthetic practices, and why we should want access to it to live our aesthetic lives to the full.

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)

Perceptual performance, anticipating opponents' strategies, and judging chess positions especially in subliminal processing is related to expertise level and dependent on chunking processes. It becomes obvious that chess expertise is a multidimensional phenomenon related predominantly to experience. Under consideration of chess expertise categorization, we conducted two priming experiments expanding existing designs by gradually increasing the target and task complexity. The main aim was the evaluation of potential visuocognitive limitations. The results reveal experts' perceptual superiority manifested by their (...) faster reaction times in settings with increased stimulus and task complexity. Further, experts' priming effects seem to be affected by the target content and/ or priming duration. For short prime duration, experts show priming effects only for less complex prime-target content. Interestingly, for longer prime duration and more complex prime-target content, all participants reveal priming effects. In summary, we argue that experts' visuocognitive processing is rooted in a more efficient visuocognition due to stored chunks of checking and mating constellations. We suggest that visuocognitive limitations are related also to the prime-target complexity as well as to the task. Further investigations must be conducted in order to elucidate the factors with an increased impact on chess players' performance. (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)

Based on in-depth interviews with policymakers and archival data, we examine the policy debates over court reform in family law and criminal law in Chile after the democratic transition. We introduce the concept of “gendered expertise” to capture the set of competences and claims organized around perceived gender differences and mobilized through gendered networks that we found in these debates. We show how gender structured and valorized lawyers’ expertise and shaped the differing outcomes in these two reforms. In (...) the power struggles among law reformers, both men and women lawyers used gendered expertise as a resource for characterizing themselves and their opponents. In the end, criminal law reform not only received far more political and economic support for its implementation than any other Chilean judicial reform, but defined the appropriate political reforms in relation to gendered meanings of law and political reconciliation. (shrink)

Learning more about philosophical cognition has yielded significant insights into the methods that we employ when doing philosophy, and has led some experimental philosophers to raise concerns about the role that intuitions play in philosophical practice. One popular response to these methodological concerns involves appeal to philosophical expertise, and has become known as the expertise defense because it aims to defend the use of at least some kinds of intuitional evidence in philosophy. The basic idea is that philosophical (...) expertise consists in having developed, through a process of critical reflection, increased conceptual competence and theoretical accuracy, as well as a special knack for reading and thinking about philosophical thought experiments that call upon us to exercise our conceptual competence and theoretical acumen. It turns out to be an open question whether this folk theory of philosophical expertise can restore hope in the value of intuitional evidence, and here we examine two ways of trying to answer that question: one that involves careful reflection on the supposed benefits of philosophical education, and one that involves careful empirical examination of “expert” philosophical intuitions. (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)

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)

Cet article analyse la contribution des études des sciences et des techniques à la compréhension de la fabrique de l’expertise. L’originalité des STS tient à un postulat central : l’autonomie et la pureté de la science ne sont pas des propriétés intrinsèques de cette activité mais le résultat d’un travail de démarcation inscrit dans les pratiques des acteurs et dans les dispositifs institutionnels. Partant, les STS sont particulièrement bien positionnées pour analyser l’expertise comme « technologie de pouvoir », (...) ce qui correspond à un premier volet de leur contribution. L’article aborde aussi la contribution des STS à la thématique de la démocratisation de l’expertise et vise à clarifier un débat qui a été souvent abordé de façon trop caricaturale.This article analyses the contribution of Science and Technology Studies to our understanding of the way expert knowledge is produced. The originality of STS lies in its central assumption that independence and integrity are not intrinsic properties of scientific activity but the result of a process of delimitation which is inherent to scientific practice and its institutional systems, and which therefore makes STS particularly well placed to analyse expertise as a “technology of power”. This is their first contribution, but the article also addresses the contribution of STS to the democratisation of expert knowledge, and attempts to shed light on a debate that is often raised in terms that are overcaricatured. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 91-94.

This reflection piece considers how expertise has been generated within the history of madness, disability, eugenics, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. As numerous scholars and critics have pointed out, the power of rational argumentation can be persuasive, while its absence can be pathologized. Yet, in the fields of madness studies and critical disability studies we can see many examples of how the dividing line between normal and pathological states have been contested, especially where those categories correspond with notions of expertise, (...) experience, and insight. This short paper reflects on these themes and draws from a selection of research case studies, in the hopes of encouraging other scholars to take up these questions in their own work to destabilize concepts of expertise as fixed categories of ability and skill. Instead, I use these examples to promote a more complex and diverse way of interpreting expressions of dissent as potential forms of expertise. (shrink)

Much evidence cited by Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) in support of their notation-specific representation hypothesis is based on tasks requiring automatic number processing. Several of these findings can be alternatively explained by differential expertise in mapping numerical symbols onto semantic magnitude representations. The importance of considering symbol-referent mapping expertise in theories on numerical representations is highlighted.

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)

This collection addresses whether ethicists, like authorities in other fields, can speak as experts in their subject matter. Though ethics consultation is a growing practice in medical contexts, there remain difficult questions about the role of ethicists in professional decision-making. Contributors examine the nature and plausibility of moral expertise, the relationship between character and expertise, the nature and limits of moral authority, how one might become a moral expert, and the trustworthiness of moral testimony. This volume engages with (...) the growing literature in these debates and offers new perspectives from both academics and practitioners. The readings will be of particular interest to bioethicists, clinicians, ethics committees, and students of social epistemology. These new essays promise to advance discussions in the professionalization and accreditation of ethics consultation. (shrink)

Christian Quast has recently embarked on the project of systematizing the debate about the notion of expertise, an extremely fascinating and important issue addressed by scholars of many disciplines yet still in need of an interdisciplinary take. He sheds light on a number of relevant features of this notion and defends what he calls a “balanced” account of expertise, namely one that defines this concept in light of an expert’s dispositions, manifestations of their dispositions, and social role or (...) function. In this critical reply, I offer some considerations that put pressure on Quast’s balanced account and hopefully help anyone interested in this debate take a step forward toward explaining what it takes for one to be an expert. The reply is structured as follows. First, I argue that his allegedly balanced view is liable to a potentially compromising tension between its function component and the ingredients of objective expertise (§1). Then, I show that Quast’s threefold characterization of an objective expert is too strong, as it imposes conditions that several individuals whom we would consider experts are unable to fulfill (§2). Finally, I provide reasons in favor of endorsing an objective account of expertise in light of some specific features of our society and show how this account can take into due consideration the different services experts ordinarily perform (§3). (shrink)