CFP: The Many Faces of Expertise / Disputatio International Journal of Philosophy

Call for Papers: “The Many Faces of Expertise”

Special issue of the journal Disputatio: International Journal of Philosophy

The topic of expertise and expert knowledge has received a great amount of attention in recent years, especially after the Covid pandemic. Misinformation about vaccines and their effects on health, indifference to expert advice, and trust in pseudo-experts have produced enormous damage. But even before that crucial moment, philosophers, sometimes in tandem with psychologists and sociologists, have focused their attention on the concept of expertise. The topic has recently gained momentum, and it now occupies a central position in philosophy. Many important issues related to the nature and social function of experts have been discussed in depth (Baghramian & Martini 2022). For instance, the analysis of the concept has led to identifying levels of expert knowledge (Collins and Evans 2007), and the debate about its nature has distinguished objective approaches (Goldman 2001, Croce 2019), on which the possession of expert knowledge is defined in terms of the relative number of true or justified propositions the agent believes, from reputational or relational approaches (Jäger 2016), for which the credentials and social role are essential to the attribution of expertise. The social function is sometimes related to the disposition and capacity to offer advice on technical matters (Lackey 2018). Relational views are compatible with a contextualist semantic account of adscriptions of expertise.  This has opened a way to bring into the discussion questions and methods that belong to traditional debates in philosophy of language (Quast 2020). 

From an epistemological perspective, expertise is generally understood as a combination of theoretical knowledge, skills and experience, but the question as to whether propositional knowledge (knowing that) or the practical skills (knowing-how) is more basic still receives much attention (Norman et al. 2018). The search for the best criteria for identifying experts in a particular field has also played a major role in discussions of expertise (Goldman 2001). In social epistemology, epistemic deference to experts has been discussed in relation to the agent’s epistemic autonomy. Two main competitors in the debate on how epistemic deference to experts should be understood is the Preemptive View (Zagzebski 2012) and the Total Evidence View (Lackey 2018).

In argumentation theory, the appeal to expert opinion is treated as a special kind of argument with its own argument scheme (Walton 1997). The debates in this area have focused on how to evaluate the strength of this argument, with special attention to the cases that involve expert disagreement (Hinton 2019). 

The social and political dimensions of the impact of expertise on democracy has also been a central topic of inquiry (Grundmann 2022). The question about the proper place for the expert in democratic societies has been addressed, in relation to the intricate problem of the asymmetry of power and responsibility that comes with the distribution of expertise in society. The citizens’ unequal access to expert knowledge threatens the core values of democracy and endangers the neutrality of the state. 

We are inviting submissions of a special issue of the journal Disputatio: International Journal of Philosophy. The main aim of the special issue is to advance the investigation on the philosophy of expertise and expert knowledge by bringing to light questions and methods of research that have remained peripheral to the central debates on expertise, as well as to build bridges between philosophical research on the topic and other perspectives. We seek proposals that critically examine topics such as, but not limited to, the following:

-       Gender bias and expertise. The existence of gender bias in the construction of scientific knowledge is a main topic of research in philosophy of science. But gender bias is likely to affect the construction and attribution of expertise as well. The many ways in which gender differences affect the distribution and perception of expertise in society calls for careful investigation. 

-       Cultural and social factors that influence the adscription of expertise. Adscriptions of expertise are notoriously problematic for their highly contextual nature, with factors such as social hierarchy or cultural differences being potential sources of variability. 

-       Experimental approaches to study of the nature of expertise and its attribution. Experimental methods have proved to be a powerful instrument to replace unsystematic appeals to intuitions as a source of data for testing hypotheses. These are good reasons to expect promising results from applying this methodology to questions concerning the contextual factors that influence attribution of expertise. 

-       Disagreement between experts. Solving experts’ disagreement is critical to the resolution of scientific and technological public controversies (Beebe et al. 2019). The factors, political, moral or cultural, that may influence expert opinion, may lead to different interpretations of empirical evidence, and may ultimately lead to disagreement. 

-       Expertise and critical thinking. While appeals to expert opinion have received significant attention in the literature devoted to argumentation and critical thinking, there is more work to be done on the question concerning how our critical thinking abilities are constrained by ignorance of a particular field of knowledge, making appeal to expert opinion a necessary epistemic route to gaining knowledge (Ballantyne et al 2022). 

-       Testimonial Injustice and trust in experts. The concept of trust is central to discussions of epistemic and testimonial injustice, recent contributions to this topic addressing questions about the normative role that experts might play within such contexts (Altanian & Baghramian 2023). 

-       Pseudo-expertise and its many faces. While the mechanisms that motivate and promote pseudo-science have been studied extensively, there are many other questions that call for careful analysis, including the way in which pseudo-expertise relates to trespassing of expertise from one discipline to another (Fuhrer 2021), or the way in which self-perception affects our self-attribution of knowledge and skills (Dunning 2012). 

-       Trust in experts and trust in social institutions. Studies have shown correlations between political orientation and trust in state institutions, on the one hand, and trust in experts, on the other (Pew Research Center 2019). This invites reflection on how trust in experts is motivated by political views and by the perception that people have of the credibility of political institutions (Grundmann 2022). 

-       Expertise and regulatory science. The fundamental role that experts play in regulatory bodies requires careful analysis of how committees work within governmental agencies, of the criteria on the basis of which they are selected, and on how consensus is built in these contexts (Grundmann 2009). 

Reference

Altanian, M., & Baghramian, M. (Eds.). (2023). Testimonial Injustice and Trust. Taylor & Francis.

Ballantyne N., Celniker J. B., and Dunning D., (2022). Do your own research. Social Epistemology, 38: 3, pp. 1-16. 

Beebe, J. R., Baghramian, M., Drury, L., & Dellsén, F. (2019). Divergent perspectives on expert disagreement: Preliminary evidence from climate science, climate policy, astrophysics, and public opinion. Environmental Communication, 13(1), 35-50. 

Baghramian, M., & Martini, C. (Eds.). (2022). Questioning Experts and Expertise. Routledge. 

Collins, H., & Harris, R. (2007) Rethinking Expertise. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press

Croce, M. (2019). On What it Takes to be an Expert. The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 69, Issue 274: 1–21. 

Dunning, D. (2012). Self-insight: Roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself. Psychology Press. 

Fuhrer, J., Cova, F., Gauvrit, N., & Dieguez, S. (2021). Pseudoexpertise: a conceptual and theoretical analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. 

Goldman, A. I. (2001). Experts: Which ones should you trust?. Philosophy and phenomenological research, 63(1), 85-110. 

Grundmann, R. (2009). The role of expertise in governance processes,  Forest Policy and Economics,  11: 5–6, pp. 398-403 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2008.09.005. 

Grundmann, R. (2022). Making sense of expertise: Cases from Law, medicine, journalism, COVID-19, and climate change. Routledge. 

Hinton, M. (2019). Why the fence is the seat of reason when experts disagree. Social epistemology, 33(2), 160-171.

Jäger C (2016) Epistemic authority, preemptive reasons, and understanding. Episteme, 13.2, pp. 167-185.

Lackey, J. (2018). Experts and peer disagreement. In (ed.) Benton, M. A., Hawthorne, J., & Rabinowitz, D. Knowledge, belief, and god: New insights in religious epistemology, 228-45.

Norman, G., E. Kevin, L. Brooks, & S. Hamstra (2018) “Expertise in Medicine and Surgery” in Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R., Kozbelt, A., & Williams, A. M. (Eds.). (2018). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge University Press. 

Pew Research Center (2019, August). Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts. 

Walton, D.N. (1997), Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. University Park: Penn State Press, pp. xiv–281. ISBN 0-271-01695-7.

Zagzebski, L. T. (2012). Epistemic authority: A theory of trust, authority, and autonomy in belief. Oxford University Press. 

 

Editors of the special issue: 

Ana Cuevas Badallo

Obdulia Torres González

Andrei Moldovan

Please submit your proposal here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/disputatio/default2.aspx

When submitting your paper please select “Special Issue: The Many Faces of Expertise”.

You can find Instruction for Authors here: https://sciendo-parsed-data-feed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/DISP/Instructions_for_Authors.pdf

For more information, visit: https://sciendo.com/journal/DISP

Deadline: 1st of December 2025