“Experto credite”. (Virgil, Aeneid, Book XI)
“[E]xpert knowledge is ‘ideology’ taken as fact”. (Turner 2001: 127)
Abstract
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.
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Notes
Some guiding remarks may be useful here. A word in quotation marks (“expertise”) designates, as usual, the word as a word. If not otherwise contextually apparent (by phrases like “the notion of expertise”, “the explication of expertise”, etc.) an italicized and bolded term (expertise) refers to the concept expressed by that word, while set in regular print (expertise) it designates the respective phenomenon. When “expertise” is set in capitals and equipped with some index (Expertise [f,c,p] ), this is a reference to a certain approach to expertise, which will be introduced in due course, whereas in italics with an initial capital letter (Expertise [f,c,p]) it refers to a special aspect of the phenomenon of expertise, and in regular print (Expertise[f,c,p]) it points to particular manners of speaking. As we will see below, this provides us with the means to disentangle crucial aspects of the expertise-talk.
Axel Gelfert (2014: 8) mentions a similar conflict between social trust and first-hand evidence within the philosophy of testimony.
These claims are restricted to the results of cognitive psychology mainly. Here the cognitive core features of expertise are often thought of as “automaticity and a recognition-primed form of decision making” (Stichter 2015: 106), thought many related features could be also highlighted such as metacognitive monitoring capabilities, special access to long term memory, etc. (cf. Feltovich et al. 2006). However, this is not in any respect denying the unquestionable merits of developmental psychology in general or of Anders Ericssons et al. (1993) famous deliberate practice approach to expertise development (i.e. roughly the idea that it takes around 10 years of intense, improvement-oriented exercise under the guidance of external support to master a special domain of performance, be it more intellectual (playing chess), athletic (playing basketball), artistic (playing oboe) etc. There is a straightforward reason for my negligence of these prominent findings. For it is one thing, to define the notion of expertise, and it is quite another, to characterize contingent features of its development (cf. fn. 40).
Within the framework of this main function several special roles of expertise can be mentioned: Experts, for instance, cut off “reflection so that action can be taken accordingly”, reduce complexity “to create certainty in decision making”, create legitimacy, define situations, set priorities for action, make recommendations, etc. (cf. Rhomberg, Stehr 2007; see also Stehr, Grundmann 2011).
Two supplements are mentionable here: For one thing, there also is notable discussion about expertise in jurisprudence (cf. Best 2009; Brewer 1998) and economics, that is more specifically in the human resource development (cf. Cornford, Athanasou 1995; Germain, Ruiz 2009). Germain and Ruiz (2009) represent a comparative study amongst 36 leading scholars of human resource development concerning the notion of expertise to which I will refer due course in order to give evidence for some claimed usages of expertise. For another thing, there are philosophical discussions about expertise which more closely resemble the psychological discussion and mainly focus on the automaticity of expert performance and related properties (cf. Dreyfus 2005; Montero forthcoming) or stress a more téchne-oriented intellectualist account of expertise requiring understanding and explainability as crucial conditions of (practical) expertise (cf. Annas 2011).
To put in different terms, the epistemological (or philosophical) treatments of expertise often tend to identify expertise with a disposition in terms of epistemic desiderata, while the psychological treatment of expertise tends to identify expertise with its causal basis. The social scientific treatment of expertise in turn often reduces expertise to a certain status. As I will argue for in due course, none of these identifications is appropriate.
Without going into detail, I will offer a brief outline of my dismissal of the epistemic desiderata approach to expertise. Although having some epistemic desiderata is crucial for being a pertinent expert, defining expertise by means of them is highly problematic nevertheless. For one thing, this is because it is difficult or even impossible to individuate and quantify beliefs which are most probably the subjects of these desiderata (cf. Latus 2000: 30f.; Schmitt 2000: 272). But then it seems difficult to operationalize such a definition of expertise which renders these attempts pointless. Even if, for the sake of the argument, it could be assumed that a numeric value of epistemic attainment could be non-arbitrarily determined, there still is the pressing question whether this numeric value is significant at all. This is because some of the epistemically distinguished expert beliefs could be highly irrelevant or insubstantial on the one hand, or the emphasis of particular epistemic attainments could be contextually negligible on the other. Hence, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the importance of epistemic desiderata generally without defining expertise in terms of them.
Two brief remarks: First, Alvin Goldman (2016) recently suggests a series of varying definitions of expertise with reference to the seeming vagueness and fluidity of expertise-ascriptions. However, it is highly questionable whether such a disparity by its own can ever establish a corresponding disunity of its underlying term, or not rather begs the question. For it is precisely the point of giving an explication in the first place to transform a highly inexact (phenomenon-)term into a more exact one. Excluding this very possibility right from the start appears to be undue. Second, a notable exception might be Scholz (2016) who carefully highlights and classifies varying features of expertise possession throughout scientific disciplines.
Correspondingly, the Oxford English Dictionary characterizes the noun “expertise” as either the “quality or state of being expert” (this corresponds to the competence-sense of expertise) or an “expert’s appraisal, valuation, or report” (this corresponds to the product-sense of expertise). Furthermore, the noun “expert” refers to persons who “gained skill from experience”, possess “special knowledge or skill” and are thus “regarded as an authority”, whereas the adjective “expert” is reference to being “trained by experience” or “skilled”, that is to “personal qualities or acquirements”. So it is hard to deny that personal acquirements such as experience, skill and knowledge represent crucial dimensions of expertise (cf. “expertise, n.”, “expert, n.” and “expert, adj.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 18 February 2016).
Etymologically, this is the most important semantic contrast (cf. Williams 1985: 129). On reasons which will become apparent later, however, I prefer the more fundamental contrast between expert and client. This is why a group of laypersons should be considered as just one paradigmatic contrast class amongst others (for some alternatives see Scholz 2016).
For sure, corroborating scientists could still function as experts amongst themselves even if there would be no laypersons anymore. The underlying issue, however, is that if there is no pertinent contrast class of clients anymore (relevantly less competent scientists for example) for which they could function as experts, the ascription of expertise is pointless as will be argued for.
Notice that “conceptual function” is structurally ambiguous. For one thing, this is reference to the function or practical utility of expertise conferred by its notion, more precisely, a function which is part of a specific conceptual content. For another thing, “conceptual function” can refer to the denoting or expressive function of concepts more generally, that is the general function to tag those very things which fall under the pertinent concept (cf. Williams 2013: 17f.). If not otherwise made explicit, “conceptual function” always refers to the former sense.
This functionality of expertise is implicit within a number of characterizations, for instance as persons “asked for advise when important and difficult decisions have to be made” (Germain, Ruiz 2009: 627, my italics), when understood as problem-solver (cf. ibid.: 624) or by separating expertise from mere competence by claiming the expert to be “able to apply and transfer knowledge” (ibid.: 629, my italics) or to “tell you how to fix those faults and get things working once more” (Cornford, Athanasou 1995: 10, my italics).
But recall that expertise has plenty of critics within scientific discourse (cf. Sect. 1 Introduction) who would straightforwardly deny this predominant honorific use, or at least strive to change outlook. However, such a depreciative attitude concerning expertise plausibly rests on features which are subject to an appreciative use in the first place (just think about the close relation between having authority and power, or having specialized knowledge and loosing the big picture). So, basically, pejorative usages of expertise such as nerd are not entirely independent, but rather derived form a more fundamental and honorific idea of expertise.
But as Williams (2013) correctly mentions, despite its methodological priority the practical function of a term not only rationalizes its material implications, but these material implications also enable the practical function at the same time. In other words, “usage enables function; function constrains usage” (Williams 2013: 18). Thus, it is obvious that in principle such an explication is always prone to malign kinds of circularity.
For sure, reducing our interests and desires represents a third route to cope with this coordination problem. But due to obvious reasons, this is of no further interest here.
Indirect reciprocity is defined as the phenomenon that individuals help those who help others. Consequently, it is crucial to explain how cooperative attitudes and reputations develop (cf. Nowak, Sigmund 2005).
Two comments are in order here: First, since these facts about sentient beings are “so general […] that one cannot imagine their changing whilst anything we can still recognise as social life persists” (Craig 1990: 10), Craig’s condition of adequacy for the preparatory step is clearly met. Second, to motivate the above story about restricted sentient beings and the conditions of their cooperation, let me briefly anticipate two crucial results of my later explication: For one thing, expertise is a reputational or honorific term which is part of the reputational system just outlined, and for another thing, refers to a service relation which improves the social expenditure of available agential resources and so to a special kind of cooperation.
This is not the place to fully disentangle the intimate relations between trust and responsibility. However, there are two dimension of trust which are worth highlighting here. According to Paul Faulkner (2007), trust can be generally understood as the willingness to be dependent on others. This willingness, in turn, can be due to two sources: If it is grounded by a belief about the reliability of the trusted, he talks about predictive trust, and if it is grounded by “the presumption that the trusted will respond in a certain way to our dependence” (Faulkner 2007: 312), he talks about affective trust. In case of expertise, both notions are instructive. This is because the idea of predictive trust is suitable to explain how honorific terms like expertise enable trust and ongoing cooperation by being part of a reputational system. Put differently, having the reputation of being an expert is good prima facie evidence for being relevantly competent or reliable. But in a similar respect, we can also trust our car to start in the morning. In contrast, affective trust is suitable to explain the special responsibility which belongs to experts. To see this, consider that a client’s trust in experts often is relatively blind (cf. Hardwig 1985, 1991), since the expert’s reasons for a certain activity are often semantically and/or epistemically inaccessible by the client. As a consequence, the knowledge of this particular dependence carries with it experts’ special responsibility towards the client, who’s trust puts herself in special danger of being betrayed. In other words, trust on reputational experts is at least partly based on the client’s presumption that the expert will recognize the particular dependence as a reason to act sincerely and be moved by it. This establishes a special responsibility on behalf of the expert to satisfy this expectation. The familiar bottom line of these considerations is that trust on expertise partly is trust on the assumed competence or reliability and partly trust on the sincerity or proper motivation of experts.
“Agential resources” is reference to the most fundamental ‘currency’ of sentient beings, that is their purposefully exercised efforts and competences, the latter of which reduces the deployment of the former.
In a nutshell, it could be claimed that expert performance is a service which is accurate enough. And accuracy can be understood as a relation between the product of this performance and some standard in view of which it is evaluated as accurate, inaccurate or more accurate than another product (cf. Buekens and Truyen 2014: 217). These standards, in turn, are “set by agents in view of their projects and the subject matter they investigate” (Buekens and Truyen 2014: 221). So, basically, expert service could be understood as expert performance which is accurate enough for the contextually salient projects and corresponding needs.
Two comments are in order now: First, “agential resources apt for an accurate attainment of cliently relevant ends” just regards those resources which essentially pertain to a cliently relevant product in question. As a result, all other things being equal, someone is no inferior expert just because his consultation takes enormous efforts. This might be a reasonable aspect of the practical question which expert to consult, but is no factor of the theoretical question which expert is better. Second, the conceptual function of expertise does not require the expert to attain at the “cliently relevant end”. For the social deployment of available agential resources can be achieved either by more efficiently attaining a cliently relevant end or by competently ceasing the client’s unwise strive for it—for instance, if the client’s aim cannot be ultimately attained (e.g. finding the Holy Grail or turning impure metals such as mercury into gold or silver by alchemist means) or is not in the client’s best interest (e.g. because the desired end is dangerous for her or otherwise problematic).
Though certainly being vague and generated ‘on the fly’ (cf. Goldman 2016: Sect. 1) these contrast classes are not arbitrary. Rather they are contextually determined. The problem with this assumption however is that it is not less difficult to carve out the relevant context at hand (is it the context of the bearer, ascriber or of a third person), not to mention the more general problems with individuating such contexts in more detail. However, it seems safe to assume that by and large the ascription of context-sensitive terms in ordinarily language is not at issue yet. Plausibly, this is all we need for the definition and ascription of expertise.
A functionalist account of expertise need not be understood in terms of service-activities. Instead, it could be explicated with reference to the outcomes for which the pertaining competence is ability to do. But then expertise loses its distinct point as compared to competence (so that such an account falls prey of a confusion of two distinctive properties).
It is beyond question that some grade of circularity lurks here. This is because my implicit reference to a standard-use of expertise is certainly influenced by my later explication. The most straightforward defense line available might be the reference to a common dictionary (see fn. 10): As we have seen, this prompts the assumption that personal acquirements such as experience, skill and knowledge (i.e. Expertise c ) are crucial for having expertise. If that proves to be correct, every approach restricted to Expertise f-p is ultimately questionable.
However, this still is not a comprehensive taxonomy, since some protagonists of the current expertise-debate could be located somewhere in between. Jamie Watson (2016), for instance, offers an epistemic facility account of cognitive expertise which at the same time shows some traits of a more output-oriented account (i.e. Expertise c-p , for short). The same applies to a definition given by Elisabeth Fricker (2006: 233).
Individuating expert’s products by tasks is a crucial modification. Since for one thing, it neatly harmonizes with the proposed service functionality of expertise. For another thing, it provides the means to escape the Generality Problem of characterizing domains of expertise to which Scholz (2016: Sect. 2.5) correctly alludes.
To keep things simple, the products of this relation already presuppose relevance, that is fulfill a client’s pertinent interest. If, however, someone is uncomfortable with saying this and wants to construe product in a more generic fashion instead, expertise could be also understood as a four-place relation between an expert e, a client c, a range of products (or tasks) r and a special framework of problem solving f, briefly: R(e, c, r, f). Conceptually considered, this seems to be a neglectable complication of the matter.
Though the difference between natural and social kinds is not clear cut, there are some properties which are supposed to establish this distinction nevertheless. Natural kinds such as water and magnesium are often characterized by “(a) properties that are necessary and sufficient for membership in the kind, (b) microstructural properties, (c) intrinsic properties, (d) modally necessary properties, and (e) properties that are discoverable by science” (Khalidi 2013: 515), whereas purely social kinds (or social artifacts) such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are considered to be (f) mind dependent, (g) subject to ‘looping effects’, (h) ontologically subjective or (i) value-laden (cf. Khalidi 2013: 516). Based on this juxtaposition, expertise is best understood as a hybrid kind which comprises aspects of natural kinds (the possession of superior competences) as well as social kinds (the ascription of a service function). Since to social kinds is most usually referred to a residual category (that is everything that does not represent a natural kind), I will follow this usage in due course.
For sure, there are exceptions: Harry Collins (2011), for instance, defends a notion of ubiquitous expertise: “While traditional analyses take the word ‘expert’ to refer only to rare, high-level, specialists, SEE considers that ordinary language-speaking, literacy and the like exhibit a high degree of expertise even though everyone has them – they are ubiquitous” [for similar considerations see Caplan (1989: 74f.) and lately even Goldman (2016: Sect. 1)].
It is worth mentioning that authority is usually taken to be a non-functional state of affairs. Yet, Joseph Raz is a notable exception, for he conceptualizes legitimate authority as “the role and primary normal function […] to serve the governed” (Raz 1986: 56) and so within a framework of service function.
It is surprisingly difficult to explicate the reliability-assumption pertaining competences. For sure, we can claim competences (types) to be reliable if and only if most of their actual and close counterfactual exercises (tokens) produce proper ends. Basically, this is reference to the fallibility and modal robustness of reliability which is most usually taken for granted (cf. Comesaña 2011: 184). But then the question arises, how to cash out “most” and “modal robustness”, to say nothing of the nasty generality problem.
It is not arbitrary that the term denoting the contextually relevant reference classes varies within these conditions (from “contrast class” to “clients” and “reference group”), although usually being coextensional. More exactly, this opens the possibility for lacking authority, while being capable to achieve difficult activities and having Expertise c in some way, without being a respective Expert c at the same time (and in the same respect).
It is crucial to stress both aspects, since the attribution of full credit can be not only withdrawn due to a deviant (i.e. lucky) causal origin of pertinent successes by competence, but also due to a deviant origin of this competence itself (consider, for example, cases of bodily-enhancements and the widespread attitude to depreciate their respective ‘achievements’). For further discussion, see also Kelp (2015) and Millikan (2000: cp. 4).
If not otherwise made clear enough, it is worth highlighting that expertise should only be attributed to sentient beings, that is to potential subjects of appreciation (cf. CoA5). This is why potential functional equivalents of expertise such as computer-systems, organizations, institutions etc. can never be experts, or at best vicariously.
Accordingly, different from what Goldman (2016: Sect. 1) recently claims, Google ought not be considered as an (meta-)expert for anything. At best, Google can be said to function as an expert without ever being one.
The underlying reason is that expertise can be understood as a disposition to fulfill Conceptual Function, when trying under appropriate circumstances, that means if Authority, Responsibility, Competence Enough, Difficulty and Credit is fulfilled. But if there is no actual or nearby counterfactual reference group against which Crusoe can be said to be an authority or his activity could be claimed as difficult, expertise cannot be manifested and so loses its point.
A similar objection applies to another kind of approach to expertise which defines expertise in terms of stable, but nevertheless contingent developmental factors (Expertise d , for short). Exemplarily, Collins defines expertise in terms of linguistic socialization, that is immersion into a relevant linguistic community and thereby acquiring tacit knowledge (cf. Collins, Evans 2007: 3), whereas Montero stipulates experts to be “individuals who have engaged in around ten or more years of deliberate practice, which means close to daily, extended practice with the specific aim of improving, and are still intent on improving” (Montero forthcoming). Regardless of how exactly expertise is chased out, a definition within this framework never captures the nature of expertise. Not only does it fare badly with the introduced conditions of adequacy, but it also is prone to cases of intuitive expertise which clearly miss the criteria set by Expertise d (some prodigies or exceptionally untalented persons might be plausible examples in this regard). So my argument basically is that these accounts fall victim of a vicious confusion of criteria for and the nature of expertise.
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Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Project Grant no. Scho 401/7-1). Moreover, thanks to the anonymous referees, Christoph Jäger, Chris Kelp, Sebastian Konietzko, David Löwenstein, Oliver R. Scholz, David P. Schweikard and Jamie C. Watson for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Quast, C. Expertise: A Practical Explication. Topoi 37, 11–27 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9411-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9411-2