Costly Expertise

In many environments, expertise is costly. Costs can manifest themselves in numerous ways, ranging from the time that is required for a financial consultant to study companies’ performances, to the resources necessary for academic referees to produce knowledgeable reports, to the attention and thought needed for jurors to construct informed convictions. The current paper asks a natural question germane to such contexts: how should a committee of potential experts be designed, in terms of the number of participants, their a priori preferences, as well as the rules by which their recommendations are aggregated into a collective policy? We consider a model in which a principal makes a binary decision (e.g., continue or abort a project), the value of which depends on the realization of some underlying state that is unknown (say, whether the project is great or inferior). The principal can hire a committee of experts from a pool varying in their preferences. All experts have access to an information technology providing (public) information regarding the underlying state. Information comes at a private cost to the experts, who care both about the final decision the principal takes, and about the amount they had personally spent on information acquisition

Eliciting Expertise

Since the last edition of this book there have been rapid developments in the use and exploitation of formally elicited knowledge. Previously, (Shadbolt and Burton, 1995) the emphasis was on eliciting knowledge for the purpose of building expert or knowledge-based systems. These systems are computer programs intended to solve real-world problems, achieving the same level of accuracy as human experts. Knowledge engineering is the discipline that has evolved to support the whole process of specifying, developing and deploying knowledge-based systems (Schreiber et al., 2000) This chapter will discuss the problem of knowledge elicitation for knowledge intensive systems in general

Hypermedia learning and prior knowledge: Domain expertise vs. system expertise

Prior knowledge is often argued to be an important determinant in hypermedia learning, and may be thought of as including two important elements: domain expertise and system expertise. However, there has been a lack of research considering these issues together. In an attempt to address this shortcoming, this paper presents a study that examines how domain expertise and system expertise influence students’ learning performance in, and perceptions of, a hypermedia system. The results indicate that participants with lower domain knowledge show a greater improvement in their learning performance than those with higher domain knowledge. Furthermore, those who enjoy using the Web more are likely to have positive perceptions of non-linear interaction. Discussions on how to accommodate the different needs of students with varying levels of prior knowledge are provided based on the results

On perceptual expertise

Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical research on perceptual expertise: Perceptual expertise is genuinely perceptual and genuinely cognitive, and this phenomenon reveals how we can become epistemically better perceivers. These claims are defended against sceptical opponents that deny significant top-down or cognitive effects on perception, and opponents who maintain that any such effects on perception are epistemically pernicious

Expertise in chess

This chapter provides an overview of research into chess expertise. After an historical background and a brief description of the game and the rating system, it discusses the information processes enabling players to choose good moves, and in particular the trade-offs between knowledge and search. Other topics include blindfold chess, talent, and the role of deliberate practice and tournament experience

Wine, Fraud and Expertise

While fraud has existed in various forms throughout the history of wine, the establishment of the fine and rare wine market generated increased opportunities and incentives for producing counterfeit wine. In the contemporary fine and rare wine market, wine fraud is a serious concern. The past several decades witnessed significant events of fine wine forgery, including the infamous Jefferson bottles and the more recent large-scale counterfeit operation orchestrated by Rudy Kurniawan. These events prompted and renewed market interest in wine authentication and fraud detection. Expertise in wine is characterized by the relationship between subjective and objective judgments. The development of the wine fraud expert draws attention to the emergence of expertise as an industry response to wine fraud and the relationship between expert judgment and modern science

Science democratised = expertise decommissioned

Science and expertise have been antithetical forms of knowledge in both the ancient and the modern world, but they appear identical in today’s postmodern world, especially in Science & Technology Studies (STS) literature. The ancient Athenians associated science (epistemé) with the contemplative life afforded to those who lived from inherited wealth. Expertise (techné) was for those lacking property, and hence citizenship. Such people were regularly forced to justify their usefulness to Athenian society. Some foreign merchants, collectively demonised in Plato’s Dialogues as ‘sophists’, appeared so insulting to citizen Socrates, because they dared to alienate aspects of this leisured existence (e.g. the capacity for articulate reasoning) and repackage them as techniques that might be purchased on demand from an expert – that is, a sophist. In effect, the sophists cleverly tried to universalise their own alien status, taking full advantage of the strong analogy that Athenians saw between the governance of the self and the polis. Unfortunately, Plato, the original spin doctor, immortalised Socrates’ laboured and hyperbolic rearguard response to these sly and partially successful attempts at dislodging hereditary privilege..

Philosophical expertise under the microscope

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence