Online research in philosophy

Questions about the relationship between linguistic competence and expertise will be examined in the paper. Harry Collins and others distinguish between ubiquitous and esoteric expertise. Collins places considerable weight on the argument that ordinary linguistic competence and related phenomena exhibit a high degree of expertise. His position and ones which share close affinities are methodologically problematic. These difficulties matter because there is continued and systematic disagreement over appropriate methodologies for the empirical study of expertise. Against Collins, it will be argued that the term ‘expertise’ should be reserved for expertise (esoteric experts) and exclude everyday performance (ubiquitous experts). Wittgensteinian ideas will be employed to maintain that it is mistaken and misleading to derive substantive conclusions about the epistemology of expertise from ordinary linguistic competence and vice versa. Significant attention will be devoted to the notion of following a rule with particular reference to the intelligibility of tacit rule following. A satisfactory theoretical approach to expertise should not involve making important claims about ordinary linguistic competence.

The legitimacy of clinical ethics consultation is often implied to rest on the legitimacy of moral expertise. In turn, moral expertise seems subject to many serious critiques, the success of which implies that clinical ethics consultation is illegitimate. I explore a number of these critiques, and forward “ethics expertise,” as distinct from “moral expertise,” as a way of avoiding these critiques. I argue that “ethics expertise” succeeds in avoiding most of the critiques, captures what clinical ethics consultants might justifiably do, and expresses a subject matter which can be taught and assessed.

This paper explores the relevance of the debate about ethical expertise for the practice of clinical ethics. We present definitions, explain three theories of ethical expertise, and identify arguments that have been brought up to either support the concept of ethical expertise or call it into question. Finally, we discuss four theses: the debate is relevant for the practice of clinical ethics in that it (1) improves and specifies clinical ethicists' perception of their expertise; (2) contributes to improving the perception of moral competence of non-ethicists; (3) gives insight into complementary styles of argumentation of ethicists and non-ethicists; and (4) contributes to the awareness of the problem of profession-building of (clinical) ethicists.

This article addresses the problem of expertise in a democratic political system: the tension between the authority of expertise and the democratic values that guide political life. We argue that for certain problems, expertise needs to be understood as a dialogical process, and we conceptualize an understanding of expertise through and as argument that positions expertise as constituted by and a function of democratic values and practices, rather than in the possession of, acquisition of, or relationship to epistemic materials. Conceptualizing expertise through argument leads us to see expertise as a kind of phronetic practice, oriented toward judgments and problems, characterized by its ability to provide inventional capacities for selecting the best possible resolution of a particular problem vis-à-vis particular expectations regarding the resolution of a problem. At its core, expertise thus comes to exist in reference not to epistemic but to dialogical, deliberative, democratic practice.

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others’ moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraising would-be experts’ claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered.

This essay draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein?s work to argue for a practice-oriented concept of expertise. We propose that conceptualizing types of expertise as having a family resemblance, relative to the problems such expertise addresses, escapes certain limitations of defining expertise as primarily epistemic. Recognizing the pragmatic purchase on actual problems a Wittgensteinian approach provides to discussions of expertise, we seek to understand the nature of expertise in situations where the people who need to make a difficult decision do not possess or have access to the epistemic status that traditionally confers expertise. These are situations where people need to answer difficult questions that, while they may be informed by expertise in the epistemic register, are ultimately decided by expertise that weighs certified knowledge against the intractable characteristics of a particular situation. We suggest that there is not?even deep down on a conceptual level?only one kind of expertise, but multiple kinds of expertise that resonate with diverse kinds of problems.

In a recent article, Steinkamp, Gordijn, and ten Have discussed a new way of thinking about the ethics consultant's ethical expertise. After critiquing their model of ethical expertise, along with the notion that discourse can and will enable ethicists to consult without over-reaching, this essay suggests that the debate about ethical expertise is intractable because it constitutes a 'tragic choice'.

Our courts are regularly confronted with the claims of expert witnesses. Since experts are permitted to present testimony in the courtroom, we have to assume that judges and juries understand what it means to have expertise and can consistently recognize someone who has it. Yet these assumptions need to be examined, for the legal system probably underestimates the difficulty of identifying expertise. In this paper, several philosophical issues pertaining to expertise will be discussed, including what expertise is, why we rely on experts, what measures can be taken to verify expertise, and how we determine whether a particular individual is an expert.

To become an expert in a technical domain means acquiring the tacit knowledge pertaining to the relevant domain of expertise, at least, according to the programme known as “Studies of Expertise and Experience” (SEE). We know only one way to acquire tacit knowledge and that is through some form of sustained social contact with the group that has it. Those who do not have such contact cannot acquire the expertise needed to make technical judgments. They can, however, use social expertise to judge between experts or expert claims. Where social expertise is used to make technical judgments we refer to it as “transmuted expertise”. The various kinds of transmuted expertise are described and analysed.

Experts play an important role in society, but there has been little investigation about the nature of expertise. I argue that there are two kinds of experts: those whose expertise is a function of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or what theydo (performative expertise). Epistemic expertise is the capacity to provide strong justifications for a range of propositions in a domain, while performative expertise is the capacity to perform a skill well according to the rules and virtues of a practice. Both epistemic and performative experts may legitimately disagree with one another, and the two senses are conceptually and logically distinct.