It is sometimes said that experts know and decide 'in the moment', not by theoretical or propositionally articulated reflection.What differentiates expert from novice is not that the former know a lot more than the latter, but that their knowledge and the way they use it is qualitatively different. Although this idea is common in the education literature, especially the literature on professional education, it has received little sustained philosophical treatment. I shall argue that the idea of a distinct expert epistemology is not warranted. I argue that what differentiates the epistemic standpoint of experts is not what or how they know, let alone how they deploy knowledge in decision-making, but their capacity for learning.This capacity for learning is plausibly a function of their epistemic station broadly conceived, in particular the nature of their capacities for attention. 1.In this paper I explore the epistemology of expertise by scrutinising the idea that there is something qualitatively distinct about the epistemic standpoint of the expert in contrast to that of the novice. It is sometimes said that experts know and decide 'in the moment', not by theoretical or propositionally articulated reflection. What differentiates expert from novice is not that the former know a lot more than the latter, but that their knowledge and the way they use it is qualitatively different. Although this idea is common in the education literature, especially the literature on professional education, it has received little sustained philosophical treatment. I shall argue that the idea of a distinct expert epistemology is not warranted. I argue that what differentiates the epistemic standpoint of experts is not what or how they know, let alone how they deploy knowledge in decision-making, but their capacity for learning. This capacity for learning is plausibly a function of their epistemic station broadly conceived, in particular the nature of their capacities for attention.Getting an accurate account of what, if anything, is distinctive about the epistemology of expertise has implications for public policy. One of the issues at stake in claims for a distinctive epistemology of expertise is the autonomy of expert judgement. In a policy climate in which increasingly prescriptive policies have been perceived to constrain the autonomy of experts across a range of professions, the idea that experts enjoy a special epistemic standing has seemed to offer a defence against prescriptive policy-making and its attendant micro-management of professional behaviour. Furthermore, sustaining the distinctiveness of the expert's epistemic standpoint bears on how we should conceive training programmes in the professions. The suggestion that it is their capacity for learning that differentiates the epistemic standing of experts, rather than the 'intuitiveness' of their knowledge and rationality, has implications for policy, both in terms of
This paper defends an epistemic conservatism - propositional knowing-that suffices for capturing all the fine details of the knowledge of experienced nurses that depends on the complex ways in which they are embedded in shared fields of activity. I argue against the proliferation of different ways of knowing associated with the work of Dreyfus and Benner. I show how propositional knowledge can capture the detail of the phenomenology that motivates the Dreyfus/Benner proliferation.
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