An architect who has design and build 100 homes is naturally more of an expert in homes than one who's only done two, and so it applies to every other endeavor. Beauty is also in the eyes of distinct like minded groups.
mando On Nov 30, 2009, at 8:15 PM, Frances Kelly wrote:
Frances to Chris and Michael and others... Sorry to be so late in addressing and replying to this penetrating curiosity. The issue of how "experts" in any field of activity or study might be selected or conferred is an excellent probe, and should not be dismissed lightly. The "experts" indeed may for example be in life or god or art or tech or science. Pragmatism does admit and allow experts to necessarily exist, the least of which may be a normal common person engaged in the act of attempting to sense an ordinary object. Pragmatism however does not hold experts to be a group of aloof prized clerics deemed arbitrarily by some lofty isolated priesthood. Persons as experts are of course determined by the situation of their involvement. The determination therefore is essentially a limit and a ground and a context, rather than a source or origin or cause. It is by such determination that all normal humans are found by pragmatism to have the telic purpose to be experts. This is a good goal, the direction towards which they are inclined. The agent of design that drives them in this way however is not some rigid predetermined laity or deity, but rather is a dispositional tendency. The sole human alone however is insufficient to determine their own expertise, because they might be suffering from a deluded illusion, and would thus be an unreliable determiner. The normal human expert likely emerges from what is naturally given as a disposed global tendency, to what is personally driven as a further conditioned urgency, to what is socially taken as a final collected concurrency. The drift hence ranges from the humanal, to the individual and familial, to the communal or cultural and social and institutional. It is only by a group of similar experts, who by a tentative consensus of opinion, that any agreement of conformity and normality and expertise can be accepted. The expert and their expertise are thus fallible, because they must grow and necessarily by the process of evolution. Under the tenets of pragmatism, it holds that if a normal human ever could be deemed an expert, then they probably will be found as such by their peers in the long run, regardless of whether the human ever actually will become an expert. It is the optimistic struggle to become an expert that is important to pragmatists, and not the attainment of absolute expertise, which is unattainable in any event. Thanks for the opportunity to posit these thrusts and to invite your corrections. Chris partly wrote... Did Peirce suggest how experts in the "science of phenomenology" might be selected? Michael partly wrote in effect... It is important to know how the experts are determined, who judges the experts, and who prepares and selects them. Are the people who prepare the experts the same people who judge them? It is also important to know how the judges of the experts are determined, and who judges the judges of the experts.
