Accounting for the Appeal to the Authority of Experts

Abstract

Work in Argumentation Studies (AS) and Studies in Expertise andExperience (SEE) has been proceeding on converging trajectories, moving from resistance to expert authority to a cautious acceptance of its legitimacy. The two projects are therefore also converging on the need to account for how, in the course of complex and confused civic deliberations, nonexpert citizens can figure out which statements from purported experts deserve their trust. Both projects recognize that nonexperts cannot assess expertise directly; instead, the nonexpert must judge whether to trust the expert. But how is this social judgment accomplished? A normative pragmatic approach from AS can complement and extend the work from SEE on this question, showing that the expert's putting forward of his view and ''bonding'' it with his reputation for expertise works to force or ''blackmail'' his audience of citizens into heeding what he says. Appeals to authority thus produce the visibility and accountability we want for expert views in civic deliberations.My goal in this essay is to trace a convergence between scholarship in Argumentation Studies (AS) and in Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE), and then to explore one way the two projects can complement and extend each other. I start by following the trajectories AS and SEE have taken from resistance to expert authority to a cautious acceptance of its legitimacy. Both AS and SEE thus find themselves confronting an important problem: to account for how, in the course

Communication strategies for earning trust in climate change debates

“…By voluntarily undertaking such vulnerability, the speaker enters into an on‐going relationship with the audience, a relationship in which she risks being penalized by him if things go wrong. Her undertaking thus creates a situation where the audience can reason: ‘she would not risk this unless she was confident about what she is telling me.’ The speaker's undertaking of vulnerability has thus given the audience a good reason to trust her—a reason that can withstand critical scrutiny by Type 2 critical thinking.…”

The Persuasive Force of Political Humor

“…The account is "normative" because it accounts for persuasive influence based on norms that strategies bring to bear in a situation, and "pragmatic" because it refers to actual communication practices. Normative pragmatic theories have been developed to account for the persuasive force of speech acts such as proposing and accusing, and for design features including graphics and appeals to authority and fear (Goodwin, 2002(Goodwin, , 2011Innocenti, 2011;Jacobs, 2000Jacobs, , 2006Kauffeld, 1998Kauffeld, , 2001Kauffeld, , 2009.…”

“…To make the case, we first review social scientific and rhetorical theories of political humor in order to specify how integrating communication design theory (Aakhus, ; Jackson & Aakhus, ) and normative pragmatic theory (Goodwin, ; Innocenti, ; Jacobs, ) complements them. We then describe a basic model of the persuasive force of communication design strategies.…”

The Authority of Citations and Quotations in Academic Papers

“…Recently, in several studies on expertise from the fields of both argumentation (Zenker 2011;Goodwin 2011) and sociology of science (Collins and Weinel 2011), doubts have been expressed about the suitability and applicability of all or some of the questions on the list. Nevertheless, the questions can be of use to analyze and evaluate cases of appeals to expert opinion in some definite public contexts, for example, to assess cases of testimony in a court of law, or cases in which a doctor's diagnosis differs from other diagnoses or data.…”