History and Philosophy of Expertise

"Experts are supposed to know more than the rest of us. Yet this raises important questions about what it means to be an expert, what sort of authority experts have, and what role they should play in society. In this study of the long history and philosophy of expertise, Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of authority and why we can be skeptical of what experts say. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, discussing its early association with cunning, skill and authority and covering the sort of training that ancient thinkers believed was required for expertise. Watson looks at the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of 'genius' or 'innate talent' , moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its interest to computer scientists, and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today. A comprehensive tour from ancient Greece to the 20th century, this intellectual history reveals the strengths and weaknesses of different perspectives and makes a valuable contribution to the contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust."--