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Expertise in Agriculture: Scientific and Ethical Issues

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics

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Synonyms

Authority; Credibility; Expertise; Knowledge; Public trust; Social epistemology

Introduction

Agriculture, like many human enterprises, is a product of many varying overlapping knowledge practices: intensive and perceptive firsthand observations; personal experiences and communal memory; reliance on trusted interpersonal and institutional testimony, given keen discriminating assessment of credibility; and skill knowledge and tacit knowledge of all sorts alongside leading-edge science and engineering in botany and zoology, biochemistry, genetics, nutrition, land management, ecology, and oceanic and atmospheric sciences.

Agriculture, like many human enterprises, is a product of both considerable self-reliance and intellectual interdependence. This rich, complicated balance of epistemic autonomy and dependency in practice raises epistemic and ethical issues concerning the nature of agricultural expertise and, specifically, implications for how claims and renunciations of expert...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Governors State University, University Park, IL, USA

    Ben Almassi

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  1. Ben Almassi
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Correspondence to Ben Almassi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    David M. Kaplan

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Almassi, B. (2019). Expertise in Agriculture: Scientific and Ethical Issues. In: Kaplan, D.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1179-9_278

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