ABSTRACT

Following Goldman’s seminal work, most contemporary philosophical contributions on the novice-expert relation have adopted a normative, expert-focused approach. In this paper, we aim to shift the focus of the philosophical analysis towards the characteristics of the novices, and how they might determine the choices that experts make. On the bases of recent empirical evidence from social psychology, we discuss how novices evaluate the messages that they receive and distinguish diverse kinds of novices according to their competence in message assessment. Building on that analysis, we discuss the difficulties of approaches to expertise that focus only on the standpoint of novices or assume novices are homogeneous. In our analysis, we introduce the standpoint of experts, and we pay special attention to the heterogeneity of novices. This approach allows us to identify and address the difficulties faced by experts in the context of science communication. In the last part of the paper, we characterise and discuss the problem of experts when choosing a strategy in the issuing of a public campaign to advise or inform certain populations of novices.

摘要

继高盛的开创性工作之后，大多数当代关于新手与专家关系的哲学贡献都采用了规范的、以专家为中心的方法。在本文中，我们的目标是将哲学分析的焦点转向新手的特征，以及他们如何决定专家做出的选择。基于最近社会心理学的实证证据，我们讨论新手如何评估他们收到的消息，并根据他们的消息评估能力来区分不同类型的新手。在此分析的基础上，我们讨论了仅关注新手立场或假设新手都是同质的专业知识方法的困难。在我们的分析中，我们引入了专家的观点，同时我们特别关注新手的异质性。这种方法使我们能够识别并解决专家在科学传播背景下面临的困难。在本文的最后一部分，我们描述并讨论了专家在发布公共活动以向某些新手群体提供建议或信息时选择策略时遇到的问题。