In my work experience, I have come across a few instances where the natures of certain individuals’ positions have placed me in a somewhat odd relationship with them. Their job is essentially to examine the work of others, and to assure the ones paying for that work that it is “correct” in the relevant sense, i.e., that it is up to the necessary standard that was paid for. However, such individuals can only be paid for this service if their clients believe that they are legitimate “subject matter experts” capable of providing credible, reliable assurance of this sort (e.g. the business model of consulting firms, inspection agencies, etc.) And it happens in the case of many (not all) such individuals that this expertise is mischaracterized, or even vastly overstated, raising the question, what is the standard to which these individuals themselves must be held? What, in this day and age, constitutes expertise? I propose three answers. To give the game away from the start, all three of these propositions lead to the consequent inquiry, what was expertise before the information age, and is it even worth anything today beyond the three types of “expertise” that I will describe?
I will start with the least cynical of my answers: that expertise is a function of how much you are paid for your opinion, which is a function of how convincing you are to your clients that your opinion is, again, credible and reliable in the area of question. Yes, this is the least cynical answer I have to this question. In this case, at least the individual supposedly is accountable for maintaining the appearance of that which he pretends.
Another way “expertise” might manifest today is as a swiftness at sorting through massive databases or documents to extract the required information, standards, or whatever the case may call for, and regurgitate them, very often in the form of a cut and paste to an email, just in case the expert putting it into his own words exposes him to liability, since he may not even understand what he is sending. This “expertise” is even more superficial since they hardly even pretend anymore. And who can blame them!? So often, the multiplication of available information precludes any kind of up-to-date understanding; the standards become so esoteric and fluid that nobody can pretend to be current all the time. This type of expertise particularly leads to that odd relationship I alluded to, because one can suddenly be more current, more “knowledgeable” than the “expert”, simply by searching in real time and finding information unknown to the “expert” through no fault or negligence on his part.
Finally, and most cynically, so naturally my favorite answer, is that expertise today often takes the form of Socratic irony, where the “expert” is merely the one who knows, purely from observing similar past failures, just the right questions to ask to get the one whose work is to be judged to demonstrate their own ignorance, which, for reasons already discussed, is not through his own fault. The “expert” takes on the persona of a probing questioner, a Socrates who establishes his dominance by his ability to ask esoteric questions, and sells that dominance as expertise. In doing this, each time he will achieve one of two equally favorable outcomes: 1) the one to whom he is directing his questions is able to prove himself (for the time being) based on the information available that instant; in this case, the “expert” can assure his client of compliance without doing any research or bringing anything to the table besides a series of irritating questions; or 2) the questioned party collapses and the “expert” cites this as evidence of insufficiency (itself evidence that he, the expert, is doing his job) viz. a standard that, for all he knows, no longer applies; but who can blame him if it is, and his “expertise” remains untarnished regardless.
All three answers I have proposed are variations on a single moral fiction. What I mean by moral fiction is a made up, or fictitious concept that is used to fill a void in our moral account, i.e., our account of how things ought to be. (I borrow this concept from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which, if you have not read, I recommend buying a copy of before continuing with this essay.) The void we fill with “expertise” is that which was previously occupied by practical wisdom. This is what expertise used to mean; it was practical wisdom that had been honed in a particular way with technical knowledge in a focused area. Persons with such true expertise have not only the ability to state what constitutes best practice in their discipline, but also to provide an account of the history and current state of that practice, combined with the experience (gotten either personally or by being passed down from the previous generation) to back up their answer to why that “best practice” is the way that it is.
But to address the question of whether this is worth anything today, I have to admit I am largely pessimistic on this front. The level of technical knowledge needed just to understand the data available on most topics is a serious challenge to conquer, but even combining this with practical wisdom in the true and traditional sense seems to be susceptible to the same piercing questions of the Socratic breed of “experts” we see today. Full accounts of what constitutes best practice and the ability to answer “why” is not enough for such “experts;” they need to see the most current iteration of the data to support it, which is always increasing and overwriting itself. To be clear, this combination of practical wisdom and honed technical knowledge is real expertise and is worth pursuing, but unfortunately, it is not the silver bullet to destroy the pretenses of the fictitious expertise we all have experienced to some degree. If there is such a silver bullet, it needs to be logically antecedent to expertise itself, meaning it is a change in the standards themselves, in the way data is gathered, and in the way knowledge is accumulated and, just as importantly, passed down.