The Problem of Pluralistic Expertise: A Wittgensteinian Approach to the Rhetorical Basis of Expertise

Abstract

This essay draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to argue for a practice-oriented concept of expertise. We propose that conceptualizing types of expertise as having a family resemblance, relative to the problems such expertise addresses, escapes certain limitations of defining expertise as primarily epistemic. Recognizing the pragmatic purchase on actual problems a Wittgensteinian approach provides to discussions of expertise, we seek to understand the nature of expertise in situations where the people who need to make a difficult decision do not possess or have access to the epistemic status that traditionally confers expertise. These are situations where people need to answer difficult questions that, while they may be informed by expertise in the epistemic register, are ultimately decided by expertise that weighs certified knowledge against the intractable characteristics of a particular situation. We suggest that there is not—even deep down on a conceptual level—only one kind of expertise, but multiple kinds of expertise that resonate with diverse kinds of problems.

Keywords:

• Expertise
• Rhetoric
• Wittgenstein
• Practice
• Judgment
• Epistemology

Notes

1. While this anti-foundationalism is a familiar idea in postmodernism—from the logocentric fallacy to the rhizome—and could be developed in several ways, we consider Wittgenstein’s articulation as particularly apposite for our purposes.

2. See Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics: “All matters of conduct belong to the class of particular and ultimate things” (Aristotle 2004, VI.xi.3).

3. Names and locations are changed in our version of the story. The example is drawn from the dissertation of this essay’s first author.