The Brains Blog

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 …

I am grateful to The Brains Blog for the opportunity to discuss my book Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). In this opening post, I introduce what I call the five Big Questions about expertise and explain how my book focuses on attempts by philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists to …