Is Expert Authority Epistemic?

• In Event: Experts in Politics: Status, Legitimacy, and the Public (Virtual Session)

Abstract

In politics, expertise seems to get defended and attacked with equal vigour. Yet defenders of expertise keep running into a puzzling problem: their argumentative resources often further provoke the threat they seek to avert. As one philosopher of social science recently put it, there may be a ‘mutually supporting dialectic’ between a ‘disturbing increase in science denial’ and the well-rehearsed mantra of expert-driven policy-making (Blakely 2021). Thirty years since Frank Fischer observed that ‘we live in the age of expertise’, its justifications are being undermined by the same kinds of refusal, contestation, and denial.

To escape this unhelpful dialectic, this paper argues, we need to ask different questions: not how to best protect expert knowledge from getting politicised, nor how to democratise expert-driven policy-making, but whether expertise, in politics, is actually foremost about knowledge. In other words, does labelling expert authority as epistemic help us understand what makes experts authoritative? Adopting a relational view of expertise as a form of social status attribution, I discuss the case for answering in the negative.

I argue that pinning expertise down to specialist knowledge is a dead end if what distinguishes experts is the use of their knowledge (their useful knowledge) and the way in which they bolster political positions or decisions. The heuristic criterion that gets deployed in the policy-making process is not “the most knowledgeable person in field A” (ideal expertise) but “the knowledgeable person who we know or see, who is most useful for X” (expert status). The issue then turns into a question of what happens to knowledge in politics, rather than a quest for obtaining, maintaining, guaranteeing, defending it, and so on. In sum, this paper makes the case that although expert status within knowledge communities is epistemic, i.e. conferred on the basis of special knowledge-based credential, the same is not true in the arena of politics. Here, social and politically motivated selection processes change the nature of what it means to be an expert: in politics, experts are further removed from the ideal true expert than in science.

Author

• Jan Eijking, University of Oxford