Book Symposium on Expertise: Philosophical Reflections By Evan Selinger Automatic Press/VIP, VINCE INC. PRESS 2011
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Book Symposium on Expertise: Philosophical Reflections By Evan Selinger Automatic Press/VIP, VINCE INC. PRESS 2011 Stephen Turner & William Rehg & Heather Douglas & Evan Selinger
Received: 13 August 2012 / Accepted: 28 August 2012 / Published online: 11 September 2012 # Springer-Verlag 2012
Selinger’s Reflections on Expertise Stephen Turner Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida The problem of expertise has arrived recently both as a philosophical problem and as a problem for social studies of science. It has a longer history in the law. Evan Selinger, in Expertise: Philosophical Reflections, attempts to create a philosophical dialogue between the writers in these different discursive traditions, and to provide an outline of a synthesis. The book consists of chapters which are in effect separate articles, each of which takes up a set of issues about expertise. All but two have been previously published. Nevertheless, they take up and develop a consistent set of themes.
S. Turner (*) Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. Rehg Philosophy Department, Bellarmine House, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] H. Douglas Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] E. Selinger Dept. Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Expertise is, as Selinger points out, a topic which is conceived in conflicting ways in the three main fields that have a concern with it. In Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the problem is to mimic and use it. In the Social Studies of Science, the problem is to see how it is constructed and what varieties exist. In the law, where there is a practical problem of determining what expertise is, who possesses it, and when to defer to it. The AI version of the problem is represented by Hubert Dreyfus, who has a strong thesis to the effect that expertise cannot be fully modeled, but that it can be identified and understood phenomenologically, in terms of internal experience. The huge advantage of Dreyfus’s approach is this: where other approaches treat expertise as a given, and great performances as something that just happens, Dreyfus treats expertise as embodied human performance, and consequently is able to discuss the experience of expertise, or mastery. This also enables him to demystify expertise. We are all masters of our local environment, in a sense that is continuous with the mastery of great performances: we do things unthinkingly, without rules, and with an experience of flow. As Selinger points out, there is an oddity in Dreyfus’s selection of examples: he bases his phenomenological account of the experience of expert performance on first person testimonies of airplane pilots, chess players, automobile drivers, and adult learners of a second language. All of these are embodied, performances, in one way or another, and unlike what one might call sheer
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