Expert Knowledge - Part 1 of 4

When one gets right down to it, it seems that, at least from our standpoint, all knowledge comes down to expert knowledge. Practice within a field and a developed intimacy with the object of knowledge precedes any statements about logical certainty and deductive reasoning.

Let's take math, for example. Math is the most straightforwardly deductive and certain of all of our bodies of knowledge, and so if I can show that math is based on expert knowledge, then it would seem that all knowledge would be. As a math student, I had to be taught how to reason mathematically. I had to be inducted into the community of mathematicians and taught their methods of argument. When I started learning, the experienced certainty which I had of some wrong arguments was no different from the experienced certainty of many right arguments. My experience of certainty, then, was not on its own a sign of mathematical truth. I had to practice the field and learn how the mathematical community goes about doing things. Therefore, I had become an expert from the experts; it was not a bunch of reasoning which I could just show to any supposedly rational human being and have them come to the same conclusion.

Does this mean that that knowledge was just a human construction, or that there is nothing more than the agreement? Not at all! In math, the experts almost unanimously agree on the main part of the subject. In other fields, by contrast, there is a greater degree of disagreement, and so therefore the agreement does not appear to be the socialization in itself, since the practice of socialization is shared across the disciplines. It would seem that the greater the agreement is in the community of individuals looking at the object, the better our knowledge of that object is. If a bunch of people look at a visible object and agree in their description of it, it is likely that the object is what they see (more or less, subject to metaphysical and epistemological qualifications). If the people disagree, then they may not be looking at the same object, or they may not be equipped to see the object properly (perhaps it is dark). But their report of the object becomes suspect without agreement.

But if we don't have certain deductive knowledge to fall back on, since that arises out of expert knowledge and not vice versa, then the problem of competing viewpoints becomes difficult. And we cannot fall back onto deductive knowledge itself, until someone can provide a way in which I can have certainty which does not come through my own (fallible and socialized) feeling of certainty; even if they could offer anything other than a purely dogmatic assertion to the point, how would this non-perceived certainty be the certainty of my knowledge? But if we start from any system of knowledge which relies on consensus within the community, then Any time people disagree on a topic, we would seem to have reason to believe that they are not really apprehending the object of knowledge. But expert knowledge relies on stratified communities; that is, some people are included as knowers, others as non-knowers, with a range in between. It is this to which I will turn in my next post.