Disagreeing with Experts

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the question of who should be trusted as an expert and when, particularly in the context of public deliberation. Trust in experts is crucial in making decisions about public policies that involve complex information beyond the expertise of most people. However, fruitful deliberation also requires being able to resist misinformation campaigns, no matter how widespread these might be; being able, in general, to evaluate the evidence at our disposal and form our own opinions. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this apparent tension between epistemic deference and epistemic independence. The paper has two goals. First, it aims at providing a more nuanced understanding of the question of who should be trusted as an expert by examining cases in which seemingly factual claims are made in public settings by experts. Second, it emphasizes the need to pay attention to the conditions under which we actually trust each other. We suggest that fostering trust in science may be better approached by modifying the conditions under which scientific dialogue takes place, rather than trying to convince the public to trust experts, or blaming them for not doing so.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• distrust
• experts
• disagreement
• science communication

Acknowledgments

We thank Manuel de Pinedo for his comments on a previous version of this article. We also thank the participants of the workshop (No) more stories: The new challenges of science communication, led by Ophelia Deroy, and organized by the Center of Advanced Studies’ Research Group Challenges and norms of science communication (University of Munich).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Kappel (2020) for a recent discussion of what we should do, epistemically speaking, when we learn that others don’t trust the ones we do trust.

2. Recent literature has started to explore not only the characteristics of experts, but also the heterogeneity of non-experts and how this heterogeneity impacts the context of science communication (see Pérez-González and Jiménez-Buedo 2023).

3. The effectiveness of these strategies is limited. Research has shown that we tend to underestimate our own biases compared to those of others, known as the ‘bias blind spot’, which can hinder our ability to recognize our own biases. Additionally, some scholars have recently argued that there is no circumstance under which introspection can be reliable to detect our biases (see, for instance, Kelly 2023).

Additional information

Funding

The publication of this work was made possible with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870883. This work was also partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and Next-Generation EU, the Spanish Ministry of Science [PID2019-109764RB-I00, PID2022-140562NB-I00], Junta de Andalucía [B-HUM-459-UGR18], the BBVA Foundation [BBVA2021-EQUIPOS, AYUDAS FUNDACION BBVA 2021, project: OPIDPOLA], and the FiloLab Group of Excellence funded by the University of Granada.