Why the Empirical Study of Non-philosophical Expertise Does not Undermine the Status of Philosophical Expertise

Abstract

In some domains (meteorology, live-stock judging, chess, etc.) experts perform better than novices, and in other domains (clinical psychiatry, long-term political forecasting, financial advising, etc.) experts do not generally perform better than novices. According to empirical studies of expert performance, this is because the former but not the latter domains make available to training practitioners a direct form of learning feedback. Several philosophers resource this empirical literature to cast doubt on the quality of philosophical expertise. They claim that philosophy is like the dubious domains in that it does not make available the good, direct kind of learning feedback, and thus there are empirical grounds for doubting the epistemic quality of philosophical expertise. I examine the empirical studies that are purportedly bad news for professional philosophers. On the basis of that examination, I provide three reasons why the empirical study of non-philosophical expertise does not undermine the status of philosophical expertise. First, the non-philosophical task-types from which the critics generalize are unrepresentative of relevant philosophical task-types. Second, empirical critiques of nonphilosophical experts are often made relative to the performance of linear modelsa comparison that is inapt in a philosophical context. Third, the critics fail to discuss findings from the empirical study of non-philosophical expertise that have more favorable implications for the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. In addition to discussing implications for philosophical expertise, this article makes progress in the philosophical analysis of the science of expertise and expert development.

Beyond All‐or‐Nothing Approaches to Moral Expertise

“…However, since philosophy is less about prediction, the findings of these studies cannot be generalised to philosophers. 58 In what follows, I present two speculations that can be found in the literature. They are only illustrations, and further suggestions are possible.…”

“…We can hypothesise that the rarer or more novel a moral problem is, the better the position philosophers, with their superior moral understanding, will be to judge it. 58 This idea is supported by many general claims about expertise. As Kahneman and Klein explain, '[T]he ability to recognize that a situation is anomalous and poses a novel challenge is one of the manifestations of authentic expertise'.…”

Limitations and Criticism of Experimental Philosophy

“…As explained in Section 3.1, this argument overlooks important differences between philosophical epistemic activities and non-philosophical epistemic activities, thus undercutting the generalization about virtuous developmental conditions. The argument also overlooks empirical evidence indicating that non-philosophical experts who engage in tasks that are relevantly similar to philosophical case analysis (simulation, relational retrieval, grasping the importance of rare events, the discovery of new categories) are led to superior performance in direct feedback-deficient domains (Bach 2021). Still, one hopes for a positive, empirically informed account of the development of philosophical content expertise.…”

“…Moreover, the history of philosophical consensus has a worrisome track-record. 8 7 For discussion, see Williamson (2007), , Papineau (2011), Paul (2012), Ryberg (2013), Nolan (2015), Ludwig (2018) and Bach (2019Bach ( , 2021. Note that this confirmational limit on the assessment of philosophical models applies regardless of whether the disagreeing parties espouse material (synthetic) or semantic (analytic) aims when employing philosophical case analysis.…”

In Defence of Armchair Expertise

“…In other words, philosophy is not a predictive discipline. Thus, if philosophers are insufficiently exposed to direct feedback, we could not blame this fact on the types of time‐lags and related institutional entanglements that are typically to blame in expert‐dubious domains like stock brokerage and political forecasting (see Bach, , for a more detailed discussion and argument). If philosophers are insufficiently exposed to direct feedback, it would have to be caused by something else.…”