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Writer's pictureRicky

What Experts Don’t Know

(Now that I have a PhD, here’s a follow-up to last week’s article on the value of expert opinion.)


As you become an expert in a field, you begin to discover the limits of expert knowledge, and the fundamental disagreements that structure the field itself.


Expertise is weird. You decide to specialize in some area—to devote a disproportionate amount of time to mastering that field—and come to see the world through that lens. As an outsider-turned-expert, you bring a fresh perspective to a field that may have started getting stuck in its own ways.


But the longer you stick around, the more you become an expert-turned-insider. And the harder it can be for you to remember what it’s like to see the world as an outsider.


My students are too young to know where this quote’s from.


Thus, there’s a natural life cycle of the expert.


Let me try to illustrate by relating The Purely Hypothetical Life of an Academic Philosopher.


(This is not an autobiographical mission statement. Let me say that again, in suitably academic jargon: I bet you’re thinking P. Not-P.)


MOVEMENT 1: GRAD SCHOOL

As a grad student, you (ideally) get to take some broad survey courses to get a sense of the topics and questions that structure your field, as well as a few highly-targeted deep dives where you find out what producing cutting-edge scholarly work is really like. Over time, you naturally gravitate towards particular professors whose work or approach interests you, and your own Research Program gradually takes shape as you narrow your attention down to find your particular area of expertise.


By the end, you’ve produced a Dissertation, which is (ostensibly) a novel contribution extending the periphery of human knowledge. Congratulations!


In my experience, getting a PhD is largely a persistence game. Can you survive starvation wages for the better part of a decade while you complete coursework, publish a few papers, write a dissertation, and land a job? If the answer’s yes, you did it—you’re now a doctor. Now that you have a job lined up somewhere else, we gotta get you outta here!


You have become a certified expert because you convinced philosophers at some other institution that your research program was interesting on the academic equivalent of a successful first date.


To be fair, you have read a lot.


MOVEMENT 2: EARLY CAREER

While you were reading and reading and reading and reading in grad school, you noticed that most of the existing literature in your area is a terrible mess that needs someone (you) to help clean it up. People are just going about things all wrong. You have tons of paper ideas stashed away in notebooks and Word documents, and you’re finally starting to get enough research money to actually take your show on the road to conferences more consistently.


Now that you aren’t spending all your time applying for jobs, you can finally start writing the papers you’ve been describing and explaining and promising for so long in Cover Letters and Research Statements and Job Interviews.


So you do.


You write up one paper, then another. Referees (eventually) accept you, and other philosophers (maybe) cite you. You are making novel contributions to the literature, and in recognition of that, the top journals are only too happy to ask for your uncompensated labor as a referee for this new paper on a topic tangentially related to something you wrote about before.


You’re really doing it now. You’re a rising star!


MOVEMENT 3: MID-CAREER (EMPHASIS ON MID?)

Somewhere along the way, you’ve done enough Research and Service and Teaching to secure Tenure. (Let’s suppose that still exists.) Your time is increasingly spent satisfying the bureaucratic minutiae of the modern administrative university. You probably have less time to do the work you’d really love; you’re barely keeping up with all the referee requests and department meetings and your ten committee appointments and the five grad students you’re advising.


And at some point, something happens—I guess I’m not far enough along to know what. Maybe you’ve already written most of the fresh paper ideas you had, but now other experts are critiquing what you’ve said and trying to defend their views against your arguments. They’re obviously wrong, but now you’ve gotta write a response paper to show how they’ve subtly misread you in a way that puts their whole argument on skates.


"There’s always a bigger expert." - Coach Mo Cheeks

I’m not sure how it happens, but by mid-career, at least some philosophers have become incredibly adept at reproducing the familiar moves of the game, which they really are experts at. This could be the point where I note that producing ever-more-subtle papers on barns or grounding or whatever else seems boring, but I’m not saying this to go, what a waste of time.


This is not meant as a dig at anyone. Again, you are probably thinking Q. Not-Q.


I’m saying this to go, I can see how you’d get stuck.


After all, you are an established expert who’s already seen a thing or two. You’ve gotten this far by playing your game at an expert level, so now it might be harder for you to imagine things being otherwise. At some point, the game itself can set fixed points for us.

  • What counts as The Literature? Here’s the Canon.

  • What should I take away from it? Here’s the Standard Reading.


It gets harder to remember how to think like a beginner. We’ve all been in an intro class pitched a little too high. Maybe the professor expected a room of freshmen to already know the difference between epistemology and metaphysics. (Did they also expect everyone to clap when the lecture ended?)


But it also gets harder to hold the suppositions of a field lightly enough to reevaluate them deeply and critically all over again, the way you once did in grad school. And now, you have more tools and experience than ever at your disposal. So you already know that the prime suspect should probably be the husband or the boyfriend.


I am not saying this happens to every or even most philosophers mid-career. But it does happen to some of them.


E(X | X is a philosopher to whom this happens.)


A PARADIGM-SHATTERING KUHNIAN INTERMISSION

(What’s up with all the interludes lately?)

At some point, let’s say you’ve ended up writing the kinds of jargony, defensive, in-the-weeds papers you hated reading in grad school. (Someone must be doing this, because everyone agrees that they exist, just not which ones are objectionably jargony.) Your opponent tries out a novel objection, but you have a subtle response ready that qualifies what you’ve said earlier in a more sophisticated way.


As the grade school version of the story goes (yep, it’s been oversimplified), when astronomers thought the Earth was the center of the universe, they noticed that the orbits of the planets were really weird. Planets didn’t go in neat circles around us; they zigged and zagged back and forth. So astronomers invented epicycles—curves within curves—to account for the apparent motion of the planets.


Wheels within Wheels

And once you’ve added some epicycles, why not add some more? I mean, it doesn’t seem radically unprincipled. If there can be epicycles, why can’t there be a few more? And why can’t we have epicycles within epicycles? We still haven’t quite captured the apparent motion of the planets, so maybe we have to go further…


Is that enough?

Oh wait, they go around the sun.


It took a little while, but most people came around.


(I actually do not know what flat earthers think about heliocentrism and do not want to go down that rabbit hole at 1 a.m. Is the sun flat too?)


But of course—and it’s their job!—no one objected more harshly than the experts. And they had a lot of sophisticated moves they could make within the old paradigm.


They had a real bag, but it was mostly full of teleological arguments.

In principle, no result can ever decisively rule out a model. A model can always build in arbitrarily more complexity to account for odd results.


But eventually, the adjustments grow more desperate and less plausible.


(Maybe due to some perceptual illusion it just seems like the planets orbit the sun?)


So here’s a paradigm about paradigms: You can always add more epicycles.

And someone should probably try! The new model might not be better.


But in this case, the model where the planets go around the sun turned out to be way simpler, and its predictions work.


The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn went Super Saiyan enough in the broader culture that you’ve already heard of paradigm shifts. Kuhn was really interested in how minds are changed.


When there’s a new paradigm, it’s usually the younger folks who are quickest to take it up. If they’re lucky, their new paradigm will guide them to publish interesting results that challenge the old paradigm. The younger folks are newer experts, so they’re less settled in their ways and more likely to try new stuff out.


But the older folks seem much more likely to die clinging to the old paradigm.


Sometimes, experts can forget how to think like an amateur (lover).


CONCLUSION: I CAN NO LONGER IMAGINE BEING THIS KIND OF LATE-CAREER PHILOSOPHER

What would it be like to forget how to think like an amateur in philosophy?


I’m still discovering new areas of philosophy all the time.


I still haven’t lost that sense of wonder or love.


“Why aren’t grad students these days talking about the pieces we talked about when we were in grad school?”

Again, not-P & not-Q!!

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1 Comment


Guest
Jul 14

This is a powerful argument for changing one’s field every 15 to 20 years. In my youth, I saw what you describe as grumpy old men and vowed never to bee like them. I’m off to find a new field now.

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