Title:
Experts: Beyond Superiority
Abstract:
Experts' judgments not only enhance knowledge in various domains but also inform everyday decisions, shape policies, advance science, and help educate future generations. Insofar as we are interested in expert judgments, the concept of a cognitive, theoretical, or intellectual expert is relevant. Social epistemologists and philosophers of science hardly agree on what such experts must be particularly good at epistemically. That is, there is little agreement about what their epistemic competence amounts to. However, there is broad agreement that (cognitive) experts are epistemically superior to the majority (most or average agent), whatever the relevant epistemic competence is. On standard characterizations of an expert, this superiority is a defining feature. We argue against such characterizations, expose problems with superiority characterizations, and develop an alternative that focuses on epistemic coverage rather than superiority. On our characterization of an expert, being an expert in a domain at a given time consists of having epistemic competence that covers a relevant part of the competence available in the domain at that time.