The brittleness of expertise and why it matters
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The brittleness of expertise and why it matters Daniel Kilov1 Received: 30 March 2020 / Accepted: 27 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Expertise has become a topic of increased interest to philosophers. Fascinating in its own right, expertise also plays a crucial role in several philosophical debates. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to an important, and hitherto unappreciated feature of expertise: its brittleness. Experts are often unable to transfer their proficiency in one domain to other, even intuitively similar domains. Experts are often unable to flexibly respond to changes within their domains. And, even more surprisingly, experts will occasionally be outperformed by novices when confronted with novel circumstances within their domains of expertise. In section 1, I marshal the evidence in favour of brittleness. In section 2, I argue that appeals to brittleness can advance the dialectic in debates on skilled action and provide reasons to reject a powerful recent argument offered by Christensen et al. (Philos Psychol 32(5): 693–719, 2019). In section 3, I appeal to brittleness to argue against a common conception of philosophical expertise, according to which philosophers possess a domain-general set of reasoning skills. Although my argument in this section is largely negative, there is a twist. Recalibrating our understanding of philosophical expertise opens new avenues of research for defenders of the so-called ‘expertise defence’ against the findings of experimental philosophy. Keywords Expertise · Brittleness · Social epistemology · Skilled action · Expertise defence “Some people regard the former as one who knows a great deal about a very little and who keeps on knowing more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. Then he is a scientist… …Then there are the latter specimen who knows a little about very much and he continues to know less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. Then he is a philosopher.”
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Daniel Kilov [email protected] The Brittleness of Expertise and Why It Matters, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
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Synthese
-Robert E. Swain on the difference between a scientist and a philosopher (1928)
1 Introduction Expertise has, in recent years, become a topic of increased interest to philosophers. Expertise is a fascinating subject, worthy of study in its own right. But it also plays a crucial role in several philosophical debates. For instance, epistemologists have become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which we are dependent on experts for many of our beliefs. The usual case is not, as Descartes may have believed, one where we derive our beliefs from first principles. Nor is it the case, as Empiricists suggested, that we justify our beliefs by direct observation. Rather, the standard case is one wherein we defer to experts, and this is becoming ever more common as human knowledge specializes. Meanwhile, experimental philosophers and moral philosophers have wondered a
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