Transcript What is an expert? An analysis of the concept of expertise for the purpose of investigating the role of thought in expert.

What is an expert?
An analysis of the concept of expertise for the purpose of
investigating the role of thought in expert action
Münster, Germany
January 2015
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes
possible to make in a very narrow field.
—Niels Bohr
Barbara Gail Montero
The City University of New York
[email protected]
• Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler’s (1991)
jam-tasting study.
• The researchers’ conclusion: “Analyzing reasons
can focus people's attention on nonoptimal criteria.”
• Malcolm Gladwell (2007) puts it more colorfully:
“By making people think about
jam, Wilson and Schooler turned
them into jam idiots.”
• However, assuming that the food experts made
the best choices, the conclusion should be:
poor choices come not from thinking, but
from not being trained how to think.
• Aristotle: we must become morally upstanding
individuals through habit, but if you want to
become an expert at ethical behavior you need
to develop a theoretical understanding of
morality. The Nicomachean Ethics provides this.
• But what does it mean to be an expert?
• Why should the trained food-tasters count, yet not
the students? Why is it only after having developed
a theoretical background that one should count as an
expert in moral action?
A Flotilla of Questions:
• Should we define expertise in reference to some sort
of societal standard, perhaps saying that experts are
those who have become “professionals” in their field?
• Or should we rely on a test of ability, saying perhaps
that, regardless of whether they are recognized as
such, experts perform in a relatively superior manner?
• Or might there be an objective standard against which
we should measure expertise?
• Can we define expertise as the attainment of a
certain level of skill, such as what on the Fitts
(1964) model of skill acquisition counts as the
highest level of skill?
• Or should expertise be thought of as the
accumulation of knowledge (if one thinks that is
different from skill)?
• Is having trained for a certain number of years a
necessary component of being an expert?
•
Or could an expert be born instead of made?
• Can one become an expert at an activity which does
not appear to admit improvement?
• Finally, should expertise be based on performance or
ability? (Relevance of performance anxiety)
• The truth of view that experts, when performing at
their best, act intuitively, effortlessly and
automatically depends in part on how we answer
these questions.
No Agreed Upon Definition
• There is a vast literature in the cognitive sciences on
expertise, yet there is a considerable amount of
disagreement as to what counts as an expert
(Ericsson 2006).
• Sometimes this doesn’t matter.
• Sometimes it does: conclusions formulated in terms
of one notion of expertise might, without notice
and without warrant, be applied to a very
different conception of an expert.
• This might be what leads Hubert Dreyfus astray.
• The slide: “Once Stuart had worked out the five
stages [of expertise] using his driving skills as his
example, we just changed
car to plane and driver to
pilot and wrote a report for
the Air Force” (1986, p. 32).
How should I draw the line?
• How should I draw the line between the lay driver and
the Indianapolis 500 driver?
• No doubt if God were an analytic philosopher, there
would be an illuminating necessary and sufficient
condition for what counts as an expert, as well as for a
wide number of other weighty concepts.
• Yet, as will become clear as we make our way through
various attempts to define expertise, God is not an
analytic philosopher.
• If being an analytic philosopher means divining
necessary and sufficient conditions for things neither
am I:
• Although I criticize various accounts of expertise for
not matching up to certain common sense notions of
expertise as well as to how I would like to use the term,
my goal is not to come up with the one true
conception of expertise.
• That said, since defining the terms of a theory and
developing that theory are interdependent, my theory
of effortful expertise might effect how we define what
it is to be an expert.
The expert as someone who performs automatically
• Guthrie (1952): expertise as “the ability to bring about
some end results with maximum certainty and
minimum outlay of energy, or of time and energy” (p.
136)
• Dreyfus’s view of everyday driving as expert skill.
• Wulf and Lewthwaite: “relative effortlessness is a
defining characteristic of [expert] motor skill” (2010: p.
75).
• See also Fitts & Posner (1967).
The Accumulation of knowledge
• The expert as one who know more…
• Experts have accumulated extensive knowledge
about a specific domain.
• Earl Hunt: the idea of “an ignorant expert would be
an oxymoron” (2006: p. 31).
• Such a conception of expertise is more promising for
my endeavor. However,…
• Although experts often do seem to have copious
amounts of knowledge about a topic, it is not clear
that knowledge alone can be used to draw the line
between the haves and the have-nots.
• Alvin Goldman (2001), for example, argues that even
expertise in the cognitive real is not just the
possession of information but comprises various
skills or techniques.
• Goldman distinguishes
Objective sense of expertise: “what it is to
be an expert”
Reputational sense of expertise: what it is
“to have a reputation for expertise” (p. 91).
• Since, for Goldman, “a reputational expert is
someone widely believed to be an expert (in the
• On his view, experts (in the objective sense) possess
not only large amounts of information relevant to
their domain of expertise but also have:
the (cognitive) know-how, when presented
with a new question in the domain, to go
to the right sectors of [their] informationbanks and perform appropriate operations
on this information; or to deploy some
external apparatus or data-banks to
disclose relevant material (91-2).
• Might such know-how be part of what it is to posses
the information about a topic, or to have knowledge
of something?
• If you say you have extensive knowledge of Edmund
Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and I ask you what
virtue Britomart represents, you had better be able
to access the knowledge you have that provides the
answer.
• If you can’t answer that question, you don’t know
that Britomart represents Chastity.
• Other examples may better illustrate Goldman’s
point:
• Outstanding chess players not only have knowledge
in abundance, but have the ability to follow through
long chains of moves.
• Bodily expert endeavors: one can know quite a bit
about performing a gymnastics routine on the
balance beam, yet not be able to do it.
• Is this the kiss of death for the accumulation-ofknowledge definition of expertise?
• Jason Stanley (2011) argues that having a skill
amounts to knowing a fact, but not necessarily a fact
that can be expressed descriptively. For example,
Stanley argues that when you know how to ride a
bike, you know that this is a way to ride a bike, where
the ‘this’ refers to a particular way of riding a bike.
• Even if skill can be reduced to knowledge of certain
facts, the question remains of how much knowledge is
necessary to reach the level of expert skill.
• Goldman thinks that when someone is an expert in an
objective sense, this individual possesses superior
knowledge, not just superior relative to others but
superior from a “God’s eye point of view” (2001: 91).
• Yet how are we to attain a God’s eye point of view? (It’s
hard enough for me to understand the point of view of
other philosophers, let alone someone like God, who is
not one.)
Reputation
• Some researchers take reputation ( based on, for
example, peer) as indicative of expertise.
• Criticisms:
• Shanteau (1988) suggests that peers might be unduly
influenced by others’ “outward signs of extreme selfconfidence” (p. 211).
• Research by Elstein et al. (1978) indicates that
diagnostic skills were no better in a group of
physicians that were identified by peers as
outstanding compared to a group of undistinguished
physicians.
• What standards are being used to determine
whether peer nominations are an accurate way of
identifying experts?
• Although peer nominations may be used to identify
top individuals in a field, my concern is not simply
with the crème of the expert crop.
• So it doesn’t work for my purposes.
Domain-related experience
• Expertise is determined
by extensive practice.
Advantage: relatively
straightforward to measure.
• Ericsson points out: “numerous empirical examples
were reported where ‘experts’ with extensive
experience and extended education were unable to
make better decisions than their less skilled peers or
even sometimes than their secretaries” (2008: p.
989).
• In any event, this definition doesn’t work for me:
habitual actions are the result of years of practice.
Reproducibly Superior performance
• In response to perceived problems with the prior
definitions of what it is to be an expert, Ericsson
defines expertise in terms of reproducibly superior
performance (1991, 2006, 2007, 2008).
• For example, “chess masters-will almost always win
chess games against recreational chess players in chess
tournaments, medical specialists are far more likely to
diagnose a disease correctly than advanced medical
students, and professional musicians can perform
pieces of music in a manner that is unattainable for
less skilled musicians” (2006, p. 3).
What is superior performance?
• Expert performance is “at least than two standard
deviations above the mean level in the population”
(Ericsson and Charness, 2004: p. 731). (That is, better
than approximately 97.725 % of the population at a
task.)
• What is the relevant population at issue?
• It shouldn’t include the past: Many of today’s’
serious amateur runners are faster than Olympic
marathon runners of the distant past .
• The entire living population? It might not be very
difficult to be in roughly the top percentile in an
activity in which few perform.
• Only those who have engaged in the activity? This
would lead to better results for skills in which ability
is normally distributed.
• Examples where everyone develops a high degree of
skill (by some standard).
• Examples where %1 of relevant population is highly
skilled and the rest far less skilled.
• How do we determine whether someone falls into
the top percentile of ability?
• Ericsson thinks we can look at representative tasks.
But it is not always clear what they are.
• This is especially tricky in a controlled laboratory
setting.
The expert as a quick study
• Ericsson mentions “it is part of the definition of an
expert performer that they are able to perform at
virtually any time with relatively limited preparation.”
(2008: p. 989).
• Does it matter how long it takes a musician to
rehearse for a performance?
• Sometimes raw speed in action is seen as indicative
of expert action.
• However, unless the action itself is one that requires
speed, it is again not clear that this is a reasonable
criterion.
• Leonard Cohen took at least four years, he claims, to
write the song Hallelujah: “I remember being in the
Royalton Hotel on the carpet in my underwear,
banging my head on the floor and saying, ‘I can’t
finish this song.’” (Light, 2012: p.3).
My view: Deliberate Practice and the Desire to Improve
• I have questioned definitions of expertise in terms of
automaticity, accumulation of knowledge, peer
nominations, domain-related experience, reproducible
superior performance, ability to perform with limited
preparation, and performance speed.
• “Experts” have engaged in around ten or more years
of deliberate practice, which means close to daily,
extended practice with the specific aim of improving,
and are still intent on improving.
• And I use the term “expertise” to refer to the skill that
such individuals have developed.
How can I tell if someone is an expert?
• As long as the skill is the result of extended-deliberate
practice and the individual still has the drive to
improve, we have an “expert.”
• Information from the individuals themselves, or from
biographical information about them (or in my own
case, of course, autobiographical information).
• Occasionally I might simply take professional status or
recognized national status as indicative of having
engaged the relevant practice and having the relevant
drive.
• This is far from a perfect indicator, yet I think that it is
adequate for my purposes.
Conclusion
• In his quest to understand what goes into making an
expert, Ericsson needs an independent criterion for
what counts as an expert.
• As my concern is not what goes into making an expert
but with what goes on in the mind of the expert in
action, I can, without circularity, simply co-opt
Ericsson’s findings and build them into my definition of
expertise.
• And that’s what I do: experts are those who have
engaged in around ten or more years of deliberate
practice and are still passionate about improving.
• The just-do-it principle is false when applied to such
individuals.