There are no experts in science, David Coady (2012) says; it is a “kind of loose baggy monster,” too big and disparate a domain for any one person to achieve mastery over it. Dale Jamieson (2014) likewise argues that there are no experts on climate change, though there are certainly many experts in the many specialized fields that contribute to our collective understanding of climate change. Is the same true for expertise itself? Are there any experts on expertise, and if so, must one already have achieved expertise on expertise in order to recognize one? If Jamie Carlin Watson is right, then expertise in a domain at a time involves a high level of both understanding and performance of the activities distinctive of practitioners in that domain in the era in question. I don’t know whether expertise itself is a well-formed domain, and despite my own training and track record, if it takes an expert in expertise to reliably identify an expert in expertise, I don’t know how much you should trust my judgment. What I can say with some confidence is that Watson’s new book Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic 2020) demonstrates a high level of understanding of and performance in the cross-disciplinary study of expertise, worthy of some degree of trust in its epistemic authority and more importantly worth reading by anyone interested in expertise today. 

Early on Watson says that he himself learned the most from introductions like Bernard Williams’s Morality (1972) and Coady’s What to Believe Now (2012), texts that ably present multiple sides of an argument while also developing their own arguments that carry throughout. Among the many virtues of Watson’s own book is that it achieves this balance. When the author concludes with his own general theory of expertise, which he calls the Cognitive Systems Model, his readers can see how this model stands in meaningful dialectical relationship with the truth-based, performance-based, and social-role accounts of expertise introduced and examined in the preceding chapters. Yet these preceding chapters are not merely preamble. Watson takes the time to explicate the state of the field in comprehensive fashion, in measured presentations that proponents will recognize as fair, and to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in existing accounts. Advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in epistemology, psychology, or science studies could easily be built around this book, which along the way identifies key interlocutors that instructors and students can put into fruitful conversation with Watson’s critical commentaries and his own novel account.

While different domains of expertise often involve technical ideas and specialized jargon, expertise itself would seem to be an ordinary concept. Yet “[w]hen it comes to saying precisely what it means to be an expert, we’re in the weeds before we’ve even started down a promising path,” Watson observes. “A central difficulty with studying expertise is that different scholars focus on different aspects of it” (ix). Watson is not content to leave different scholars with our varied partial working understandings of expertise as we partially encounter it. He’s after a general account of expertise, “an account that will explain what it means to be an expert, irrespective of the type of competence or field of study,” which “draws together similarities of disparate types of expertise into a unified account of what makes them all instances of the same concept” (xi).

Here we might pause to ask whether we should even aspire to unify disparate types of expertise as all instances of the same concept. To his credit Watson does not assume a viable general account of expertise must exist, but beginning with Plato’s ancient taxonomy and carrying through the rest of the book is the sense that a general theory of expertise is desirable. Watson does acknowledge both relativistic and pluralist ‘family resemblance’ ways of making sense of experts and expertise. I might have liked to see more on non-reductive and pluralist accounts than the brief discussions here of Christopher Quast (2018) and Majdik & Keith (2011), respectively, but then this book is not meant to be an impartial assessment of all possible positions on expertise but an introduction to the literature as it stands, and in that respect it is quite successful. (While Watson finds existing non-reductive and pluralist accounts to be insufficient, he is open to the possibility that they could be further developed and thus warrant reconsideration.) Watson is not alone in aiming for a general theory of expertise. The same aspiration underlies a variety of accounts of expertise covered here, including multiple veritistic (Coady 2012; Goldman 2018), social (Collins & Evans 2007; Turner 2014), and both phenomenological (Dreyfus & Dreyfus 1986) and psychological (Ericsson & Pool 2016; Tetlock 2005) performance-based accounts. How one constructs a particular general theory of expertise inevitably frames the debate in a certain way, Watson reminds us, revealing possible misconceptions, unseen implications, and avenues for further study. With this in mind, he builds the Cognitive Systems Model on insights gleaned from critical engagement with existing accounts. Rejecting truth as necessary for expertise, Watson agrees with veritists on the need for an objective basis for the cognitive competence of experts; rejecting reputation and audience recognition as inadequate bases for experts’ epistemic authority, he agrees that expertise is irreducibly social. The contrasts between Dreyfus and Collins on embodiment, Dreyfus and Ericsson on nonmindedness, and Ericsson and Tetlock on expertise in kind and wicked worlds inform Watson’s two-tiered account of System 1 and 2 Expertise (modelled after Kahneman 2011 on fast and slow thinking). “This discussion leads us to a novel conclusion,” he writes:

A high degree of competence in a domain at a time (expertise) is developed differently depending on the demands of the domain. In domains that are well-defined, highly structured, and include amply opportunities for immediate feedback – i.e., kind environments – expertise is efficiently acquired by training System 1 cognitive processes (by deliberate practice) so that performance is subconscious and intuitive…In domains that are less well-defined, loosely structed, and in which feedback is largely indirect – wicked environments – expertise can be acquired by training System 2 cognitive processes (with expansive practice) so that performance is reflective and careful. [173]

In this way Watson offers an impressive new theory of expertise which is both general and flexible, and also applicable to philosophical debates over expertise that go beyond the scope of this book, including when to trust experts, how to find them, and whom to believe when they disagree.  

This review is by necessity incomplete. There is much more here that will reward careful readers, including Watson’s discussion of expert systems, mechanisms confounding trust in experts today, and his concept of expansive practice; particularly fascinating is how Watson handles the problem of expertise in potentially hollow domains such as Creationism or parapsychology. And while this is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of expertise, it is not only for philosophers. This is an excellent book for both research and teaching purposes, with something to offer those looking for a comprehensive introduction to expertise as it has been theorized across philosophy, psychology, and sociology, as well as those of us who specialize in these disciplines and could use some help escaping our epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.  

Works Cited:

Coady, David. 2012. What to Believe Now. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Collins, Harry & Robert Evans. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert & Stewart Dreyfus. 1986. Mind over Machine. New York: Free Press.

Ericsson, K. Anders & Robert Pool. 2016. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Boston: Mariner. 

Goldman, Alvin. 2018. Expertise. Topoi 37 (1).

Jamieson, Dale. 2014. Reason in a Dark Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kahenman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Majdik, Zoltan & William Keith. 2011. The Problem of Pluralistic Expertise. Social Epistemology 25 (3).

Nguyen, C. Thi. 2018. Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme 1-21.

Quast, Christopher. 2018. Towards a Balanced Account of Expertise. Social Epistemology 32 (6).

Tetlock, Philip. 2005. Expert Political Judgment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Turner, Stephen. 2014. The Politics of Expertise. London: Routledge.

Williams, Bernard. 1972. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. New York: Harper Torchbooks. 

Ben Almassi is an Associate Professor at Governors State University, where he teaches courses in medical ethics, environmental ethics, political theory, feminist theory, logic, and epistemology. He can be found online at https://www.govst.edu/Site_Navigation/Contact/Directory/balmassi/.