Expertise: what, where, and when.

Humana.Mente – Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2015

There are many philosophical problems surrounding experts, given the power and status accorded to them in society. We think that what makes someone an expert is having expertise in some skill domain. But what does expertise consist in, and how closely related is expertise to the notion of an expert? In this paper I inquire into the nature of expertise, by drawing on recent psychological research on skill acquisition and expert performance. In addition, I connect this research on expertise to the larger context of psychological research on human cognition, as it will illuminate some of the differing elements of expertise. This allows me to then critique philosophical accounts of expertise, by showing how they make unwarranted assumptions about skills and expertise. Finally, I note the ways in which being credited as an expert can diverge from the possession of expertise itself. This can help us resist some of the power dynamics involved with those deemed to be experts.

2018

There is an ongoing debate in the philosophy and psychology of skill as to the nature of expertise. On the one side of this debate are those who maintain that although novices need to think about, deliberate over, and pay attention to their developing skills, experts perform optimally in the absence of conscious skill-directed attention, while on the other side, are those who maintain that experts generally are consciously engaged in their execution of their skills. What, exactly, do the various proponents of each side of this debate mean by “expert” when they claim that experts either do or do not consciously attend to their movements in action? The aim of this paper is to describe and critically analyze some of the uses of the term “expert” in the expertise literature, along with the criteria that have been employed to identify experts and, ultimately, to suggest a conceptualization of expertise that may facilitate a more productive debate over the question of whether experts thin...

Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 2008

Table 1 is the Periodic Table of Expertises-a table of the expertises that might be used when individuals make judgments. The table is drawn in two dimensions, but every now and again, as indicated below, a third dimension would be useful. This chapter deals mainly with the fi rst three rows. The next chapter deals mainly with the bottom two rows-Meta-Expertises and Meta-Criteria. We begin, however, with a summary explanation of the whole table that can act as a map or "ready reference"-a quick reminder of the whole structure and the meaning of any particular category. At the end of chapter 2 we will provide another summary for those who have read through the details. Working from the top of the table, ubiquitous expertises are those, such as natural language-speaking, which every member of a society must possess in order to live in it; when one has a ubiquitous expertise one has, by defi nition, a huge body of tacit knowledge-things you just know how to do without being able to explain the rules for how you do them. This row of the table also includes all those expertises one needs to make political judgments. Below this line the table is exclusively concerned with technical expertises-those that have science and technology content. Dispositions are not very important to the conceptual structure of the table; they are personal qualities-the ones we discuss are linguistic fl uency and analytic fl air. The next row deals with the specialist expertises. Low levels of specialist expertise are better described as levels of knowledge-like knowledge of the kind of facts needed to succeed in general knowledge quizzes. One may be able to recite a lot of such fact-like things without being able to do

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2018

This paper tackles the problem of defining what a cognitive expert is. Starting from a shared intuition that the definition of an expert depends upon the conceptual function of expertise, I shed light on two main approaches to the notion of an expert: according to novice-oriented accounts of expertise, experts need to provide laypeople with information they lack in some domain; whereas, according to research-oriented accounts, experts need to contribute to the epistemic progress of their discipline. In this paper, I defend the thesis that cognitive experts should be identified by their ability to perform the latter function rather than the former, as novice-oriented accounts, unlike research-oriented ones, fail to comply with the rules of a functionalist approach to expertise.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2019

This chapter differentiates two approaches to the study of expertise, which I call the "absolute approach" and the "relative approach," and what each approach implies for how expertise is assessed. It then summarizes the characteristic ways in which experts excel and the ways that they sometimes seem to fall short of common expectations. 2

Topoi

I describe the program of analysis of expertise known as 'Studies of Expertise and Experience', or 'SEE' and contrast it with certain philosophical approaches. SEE differs from many approaches to expertise in that it takes the degree of 'esotericity' of the expertise to be one of its characteristics: esotericity is not a defining characteristic of expertise. Thus, native language speaking is taken to be an expertise along with gravitational wave physics. Expertise is taken to be acquired by socialisation within expert communities. Various methods of analysis are described.