Expertise Explained

Abstract In this short piece, I invite readers to think about whether expertise is something as real as trees and mountains, or whether it is our own creation as a society. I discuss the challenges that a purely social view of expertise raises: inconsistent relativism, contradictions, frauds, epistemic and social anarchy. As a way out of these difficulties, I suggest that we must opt for an objective take on expertise. Of course, possessing expertise is relative in the sense that it is a consistent relational property between various levels of expertise. However, this relation is ‘objective’. It is an ‘objective relational property’. Taking this realist view on expertise can shed light on some difficulties, such as the expertise status of Newton in comparison to contemporary physicists and the English proficiency of native English speakers compared to monolingual non-English speakers.