Cases of innocence In my previous post I started telling you about epistemic innocence. Some irrational beliefs can have epistemic benefits that would be impossible or difficult to attain by other means. This does not cancel out their irrationality, but makes them innocent to the extent that, in at least …
Silver linings I took this photograph in a place that means a lot to me, the lagoon in Nora, Sardinia. It is a wetland which is home to amazing wildlife and also to a rescue centre for injured sea turtles. To me, it is a picture of hope. There are …
We are thrilled that Lisa Bortolotti is joining us until Friday for a sneak peak at their new book The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs (Oxford, 2020). You can find all their posts on one page here (as they become available).
Over the week, I have sketched three attempts to answer the questions: What is an expert? and How does someone become an expert? Though I’ve glossed over many details, the accounts point roughly to the following features of expertise: Expertise involves extensive competence in a domain (including extensive tacit or …
Up to now, I have discussed only what might be called “objective” accounts of expertise. These try to explain the essential features of expertise without reference to how others think about experts. But it seems plausible to many that what others think of experts matters for whether someone is an …
Regardless of the plausibility of truth-based accounts of expertise, no one doubts that there are performative experts. We trust airline pilots to get us where we’re going, engineers to build safe bridges, and surgeons to perform complicated procedures. And no one denies that performative expertise involves some degree of propositional …
There are two commonsense ways of thinking about expertise that trace at least back to Plato’s Statesman. The first is to think of expertise as performative: an acquired level of skill in a domain. This includes domains of crafts, like blacksmithing or pottery, domains of services, like piloting a ship …
