Experts and Expertise Interdisciplinary Issues edited by Elisabetta Lalumera Giovanni Tuzet ISSUE 28 – MAY 2015 EDITORIAL MANAGER: DUCCIO MANETTI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: SILVANO ZIPOLI CAIANI - UNIVERSITY OF MILAN VICE DIRECTOR: MARCO FENICI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL BOARD JOHN BELL - UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO GIOVANNI BONIOLO - INSTITUTE OF MOLECULAR ONCOLOGY FOUNDATION MARIA LUISA DALLA CHIARA - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE DIMITRI D'ANDREA - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE BERNARDINO FANTINI - UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE LUCIANO FLORIDI - UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD MASSIMO INGUSCIO - EUROPEAN LABORATORY FOR NON-LINEAR SPECTROSCOPY GEORGE LAKOFF - UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY PAOLO PARRINI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE ALBERTO PERUZZI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE JEAN PETITOT - CREA, CENTRE DE RECHERCHE EN ÉPISTÉMOLOGIE APPLIQUÉE CORRADO SINIGAGLIA - UNIVERSITY OF MILAN BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN - SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY CONSULTING EDITORS CARLO GABBANI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE ROBERTA LANFREDINI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE MARCO SALUCCI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE ELENA ACUTI - UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE MATTEO BORRI - UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE ROBERTO CIUNI - UNIVERSITY OF BOCHUM TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Elisabetta Lalumera, Giovanni Tuzet Experts and Expertise. Interdisciplinary Issues III PAPERS Carlo Martini The Paradox Of Proof And Scientific Expertise 1 Christian Dahlman, Lena Wahlberg, Farhan Sarwar Robust Trust in Expert Testimony 17 Susan Haack The Expert Witness: Lessons from the U.S. Experience 39 Ronald J. Allen A Note To My Philosophical Friends About Expertise And Legal Systems 71 Elisabetta Lalumera Overcoming Expert Disagreement In A Delphi Process. An Exercise In Reverse Epistemology 87 Matt Stichter Philosophical and Psychological Accounts of Expertise and Experts 105 Ben Trubody A Paradigm for Your Thoughts: A Kuhnian Analysis of Expertise 129 Gloria Origgi What Is An Expert That A Person May Trust Her? Towards A Political Epistemology Of Expertise 159 Suzanne Uniacke Responsibility, Expertise and Trust: Institutional Ethics Committees and Science 169 Itay Snir Experts Of Common Sense: Philosophers, Laypeople And Democratic Politics 187 Jean-Marie Chevalier The Day After The Day Of The Experts. Lessons From J.M. Cattell, B.I. Gilman And C.S. Peirce 211 Francesca Ervas (Becoming) Experts In Meaning Ambiguities 225 BOOK REVIEWS Federico José Arena Democracy, expertise, and academic freedom: a First Amendment jurisprudence for the modern state by Robert C. Post 245 Fabrizio Esposito Nudge and the Law by Alberto Alemanno and Anne-Lise Sibony (Eds.) 255 Introduction Experts and Expertise. Interdisciplinary Issues Elisabetta Lalumera † [email protected] Giovanni Tuzet ‡ [email protected] Today the role of experts is pervasive in the everyday life of both individuals and communities. At the collective level, governments and groups routinely delegate scientific, economic and technological decisions to experts; expert witnesses play a key role in legal contexts, and the evaluation of academic and scientific institutions is demanded to expert peers. At the individual level, each of us defers to experts for the correct understanding of problems, issues, concepts and word meanings in some domains, and trusts experts blindly at least in some cases. Finally, both communities and individuals face the problem of what to do when experts disagree. The study of experts and expertise lies at the intersection of cognitive and social psychology, epistemology, economics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of language, but the various perspectives seldom meet together. For these reasons, we think it is timely to pose fundamental questions on the notions of expert and expertise in an interdisciplinary manner, so that issues raised within a specific debate may find solutions and integrations from other debates. The aim of this issue of the present journal is to collect a variety of points of view on the topics of experts and expertise, with a special focus on the following issues: what experts are, and what the criteria are for individuating them; how expert cognition differs from layperson cognition in specific domains; † Università degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy. ‡ Università Bocconi, Milan, Italy. Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2015, Vol. 28, III–V IV Humana.Mente – Issue 28 – May 2015 whether and to what extent it is rational to trust experts, provided that we cannot assess their competence; how it is correct to characterize experts’ disagreement, and what we are to do when experts disagree. Thus the essays collected here range from theoretical questions about expertise to practical ones related to expert knowledge and advice. Among the former, some of the contributions discuss the features of expertise not only to better grasp it but also to distinguish true experts from fake ones, or at least reliable from less reliable expert opinions. Among the latter, several contributions touch upon the issue of democracy in the age of expertise, starting from the assumption that expertise applied to political, legal and economic decisions is in tension – to say the least – with the idea that citizens should be on the same footing when public decisions are made. It is not surprising that it is so. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable to defer to expert cognition and have a world characterized by some division of the cognitive labor. On the other hand, it seems equally reasonable to let people decide what they want from life and institutions. For instance, should expert medical advice constrain our habits and lifestyle in general? Should expert economic advice constrain governments? Should expert forensic opinions constrain judges and juries? If not, why ask them to give their advice? If yes, why not let them decide in the first place what is good for us as individuals and communities? There is an easy way-out, in theory. It is the salutary Humean division of questions of fact and questions of value. Emphatically put, it is the fact/value dichotomy that saves us from all sorts of expert confusion. If someone gives us expert cognition, they give us a piece of knowledge that we non-experts could not get (or could get at a significantly greater cost). But as a piece of knowledge it simply relates some fact. And according to Hume we cannot infer values from facts. Or, to put it differently, we cannot derive an ought from an is. So, expertise correctly understood does not constrain practical decision in any strong sense. It simply provides knowledge for a better-informed decision- making. In a liberal society, it is good to have some medical advice, but it’s bad to have the physician decide in our place what we should do, eat and drink. Similarly, it is good to have the government supported by economic advice, but it’s bad to have economists decide in place of elected bodies. And it’s good to have judges and juries informed by experts, but it’s bad to let experts decide. It Introduction V is conceptually and logically bad, first and foremost, because knowledge by itself doesn’t tell us what to do, if Hume was right. However, it’s true that in the real world important issues are terribly complex, and it’s often hard to discriminate fact from value, let alone true from fake experts and what to do when experts disagree (which happens almost always). On a philosophical tone, we need also consider the (slippery?) distinction of “knowledge that” and “knowledge how”; the first is theoretical, so to say, and the second practical. Does this blur the Humean division? Is it possible to have an expert practical advice if it expresses a form of “knowledge how”? In addition, what is the relevant notion of “experience” at play here? And what is the appropriate propositional attitude towards expertise? Belief or acceptance? In sum, there are many questions and issues raised by the pervasive role of experts in our world. Of course the present collection doesn’t provide any definitive answer to them, but we think it provides at least some good insight and food for thought. VI Humana.Mente – Issue 28 – May 2015 The Paradox Of Proof And Scientific Expertise Carlo Martini † [email protected] ABSTRACT In this paper I criticize the current standards for the acceptability of expert testimony in current US legislation. The standards have been the subject of much academic literature after the Frye and Daubert cases. I expose what I call the Paradox of Proof, and argue that the historical and current standards have sidestepped the problem of determining who is an expert and who is not in a court of law. I then investigate the problem of recognizing expertise from the layperson’s standpoint, and suggest what courses of action the future research ought to take on the problem of identifying expertise. Keywords: expertise, experts, laypeople, proxies, legal proof, demarcation, Harry Collins, Robert Evans. Introduction Living in societies, we rely constantly on the work of others for our needs: we rely on the baker to provide us bread in exchange for money, or on the construction worker to build our house. But reliance on others is not only material, it is also epistemic. Contemporary philosophers and social epistemologists, inspired by what Adam Smith called “division of labor” — he probably had in mind mostly material labor (see Smith, 1976) — have investigated the division of “epistemic labor” among the members of our epistemic communities. Kitcher (1990), focusing on scientific communities,