How should we deal with our epistemic dependence on experts? More specifically, I want to start to answer questions about the best way to assess someone’s expertise and what to do with information we gather from the people we judge to be more knowledgeable, more experienced, or simply smarter than us. In chapter one, I take on what is usually considered the best way to assess someone’s expertise: evaluating track records. I argue that there is a serious problem with how novices evaluate track records that seems to have escaped our notice thus far and that it is dangerous enough to sometimes call for avoiding any track record evaluations. In chapter two, I restrict my scope to the moral domain and consider what we should do with the moral information we might get from someone we judge to be more of an expert than us. I argue that on particular moral questions, we should defer to someone who is more reliable than us with respect to that moral question.
Choi, Wonchul Eric,
"An Incomplete Guide to Dealing with Experts"
(2021).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/p07r-4m59
