Expertise and Rationality :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Expertise and RationalityABSTRACT I explore the tie between expertise and rationality. I first make explicit the philosophically dominant view on this club, i.e., the expert-consultation view. This view captures the rather obvious head that a rational right smart of proceeding on a effect of importance when one lacks fellowship is to consult experts. Next, I enumerate the difficulties which plague this view, locating them to some extent in the current philosophical publications on expertise and rationality. I then propose that different lessons should be perplexn for rationality from the item of expertise. One is that some empirical and phenomenological studies of the temper of expertise can be fruitfully applied by similitude to theories of the rational agent. Chicken-sexers exist. It is a fact that there are experts in this and galore(postnominal) other domains. It is also a fact that some philosophers, often epistemologists, stop the fact of expertise to be bound up somehow or other with rationality. The standard articulation of this connection is that a rational way of proceeding on a division of importance when one lacks knowledge is to consult experts. But does this view capture the full significance of the fact of expertise for rationality? In this paper I will signal that the fact of expertise has import beyond the standard view for the summary of rationality. I will proceed by first considering in much detail the standard view, and then jump off from that discussion to draw a different lesson for our understanding of rationality from the fact of expertise.It would seem that the connection between expertise and rationality is so obvious as to be mundane when one lacks expertise on a given matter of importance, and there are people who have that expertise and who can be consulted without undue cost, then (ceteris paribus) one should consult such people. This prescription link expertise and rationality by means of expert-consultation. When our cars are kaputt, when our tooth aches, when the souffl collapses, when our French falls short, and when our business lacks efficiency we consult the appropriate experts in order to cerebrate and behave in ways that are sufficiently non-arbitrary so as to count as rational. Expert consultation is thus a preference for rationality we have the remarkable cognitive ability to let the expiration of expert consultation affect what we believe. (1)The preceding paragraph captures in a simplified way the powerful idea that the connection between expertise and rationality is that of expert consultation.