Concept
Expert
Overview
An expert is somebody who has a broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill, and experience in a particular field or area of study, derived from both practice and education. Informally, an expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study. Experts are called in for advice on their respective subject, but they do not always agree on the particulars of a field of study. An expert can be believed, by virtue of credentials, training, education, profession, publication or experience, to have special knowledge of a subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially (and legally) rely upon the individual's opinion on that topic. Historically, an expert was referred to as a sage. The individual was usually a profound thinker distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment.
In specific fields, the definition of expert is well established by consensus and therefore it is not always necessary for individuals to have a professional or academic qualification for them to be accepted as an expert. In this respect, a shepherd with fifty years of experience tending flocks would be widely recognized as having complete expertise in the use and training of sheep dogs and the care of sheep.
Research in this area attempts to understand the relation between expert knowledge, skills and personal characteristics and exceptional performance. Some researchers have investigated the cognitive structures and processes of experts. The fundamental aim of this research is to describe what it is that experts know and how they use their knowledge to achieve performance that most people assume requires extreme or extraordinary ability. Studies have investigated the factors that enable experts to be fast and accurate.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Expert is discussed.
"Elective boards, consisting of the best representatives of the working class, but not equipped with the necessary technical knowledge, cannot replace one expert who has passed through the technical school, and who knows how to carry out the given technical work. That flood-tide of the collegiate principle which is at present to be observed in all spheres is the quite natural reaction of a young, revolutionary, only…
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy
a chapter is titled for it; names the idea; opens on it
One approaches the truth more nearly when one says that the argument proves too much for its own cause. If the masses are as intellectually irredeemable as its premise implies, they at all events have both too many desires and too much power to permit rule by experts to obtain. The very ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability, which are alleged to incapacitate them from share in political affairs, unfit…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
names the idea; opens on it
In what is called discipline, or in the habit of ready obedience, a militia must always be still more inferior to a standing army, than it may sometimes be in what is called the manual exercise, or in the management and use of its arms. But, in modern war, the habit of ready and instant obedience is of much greater consequence than a considerable superiority in the management of arms.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
states what it is; names the idea
While other individuals are thinking out what to do, the expert has it, sees the advantage, adjusts, and moves. Demand and solution jump together. How otherwise can we explain, for example, the action of an expert ball-player? Witness his rapid reactions, his instantaneous adjustments.
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
names the idea; opens on it
In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, _if there be a real possibility of carrying it out_. We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but, _provided one can stand it_, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at,…
William James, Psychology
names the idea; opens on it
Related ideas
- Herbert A. Simon
- Power (social and political)
- Judgement
- Dialogue
- Authority
- Sage (philosophy)
- Niels Bohr
- Understanding
- Intellectual
- Declarative knowledge
- Knowledge
- Polymath
- Rhetoric
- Reliabilism
- Experience
- Procedural knowledge
- Wisdom
- Cognitive science
- Mikhail Bakhtin
- Epistemology
- Education
- Encyclopedia
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Colloquialism
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of logic.