Assessing Appeals To Authority

Five rules for identifying, and deferring to, an epistemic authority

Authorities — purported experts — can be mistaken; sometimes, egregiously so and at terrible cost. From central planners who have unwittingly engineered shortages in essential goods, to geopolitical strategists who have grossly misjudged the intentions of their adversaries, to philosophers and theologians who have defended the indefensible, history is replete with examples of supposed authorities getting extremely important things wrong. Consequently, anyone concerned with holding true beliefs learns early to be reticent about deferring to the judgment of such authorities, however esteemed and credentialed.

Some conclude that a rational person should never defer to the opinions of purported authorities; that one must, in essence, become an expert oneself on any given topic about which one might form an opinion.

That extreme conclusion is deeply mistaken. There is a middle ground: We can, and should, defer to authorities in some cases, but not in others. Or so I will argue here.

---

1. The Concept of an Expert

I should clarify that my interest here is in the concept of an epistemic authority, specifically — not a political or institutional one. I take it that an authority of the latter varieties should often (not always) be respected for moral and prudential reasons. But of concern for present purposes is the question of when we ought to defer to the judgment of others about some matter due specifically to their particular epistemic situation with respect to that matter — that is, due to their expertise.

Clearly there is such a thing as expertise, given that there is such a thing as reality (i.e., a way that things actually are, independent of what anyone believes or wishes to be the case), and so it is possible that some people are, more than others, in touch with certain of its aspects.

---

2. Experts Exist

Some people are experts, and it’s usually fairly easy to identify them and their relative superiority in their area of specialization. Licensed medical doctors cure illnesses more effectively than homeopaths or faith healers (and, of course, some doctors are more effective than others). Trained architects design buildings that are sturdier than do untrained amateurs. Scholars know more about their discipline than do non-scholars (or scholars in other disciplines); and so on.

There are truths about reality to be known, and, at least with respect to their own field, genuine experts know more than non-experts. They are, in this way, legitimate epistemic authorities.

---

3. Deference To Experts Is Inescapable

One person cannot be an expert in all things. Indeed, most of us will be lucky to end up with expertise in anything at all. And yet, we need to form beliefs and working hypotheses about all sorts of things in order to navigate through the world. It is not feasible to become a doctor before deciding whether to undergo emergency surgery, nor to become an aeronautical engineer prior to boarding a plane, nor to become a physicist before forming a belief about whether quantum mechanics describes the base level of physical reality.

If we hope to make any progress in our lives, we need to build upon the knowledge gleaned by others. But how can we do this, without becoming overly credulous?

---

4. Rules For Deferring to an Epistemic Authority

Rule 1: With respect to some domain of reality, R, defer only to an authority who is an expert with respect to R.

All else being equal, we should defer to a physicist when it comes to matters of physics - but not when it comes to matters in which the physicist lacks demonstrated expertise. Fallacious appeals to authority often occur when someone’s proficiency in one particular area results in a kind of hero worship, whereby the person’s thoughts about entirely unrelated matters are regarded as authoritative.

Rule 2: Be conscious of expertise within subfields.

Often, there is specialized knowledge within a field that not all members of the field can be expected to possess. Although they are doctors, podiatrists are not nearly as well-positioned as pulmonologists to speak with authority on matters of pulmonary health. Certainly, if a podiatrist contradicts something that a pulmonologist says about the lungs, it is the latter to whom one ought to defer.

Rule 3: Don’t obsess over credentials, but also don’t downplay their significance.

Advanced degrees and professional licenses are, despite the myriad pathologies of the institutions and organizations that bestow them, useful indicators of expertise. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that what matters, ultimately, is that someone has obtained the relevant knowledge, not acquired particular pieces of paper.

Rule 4: Defer to an authority only if what the person says is the consensus view of fellow experts.

People are often led astray by charismatic authorities with exotic opinions - and given enough experts, it is inevitable that a sizable minority will be quacks, narcissistic attention-seekers, and so forth. It is not reasonable for a non-expert to adopt the idiosyncratic views of an outlier solely because an expert holds them.

Rule 5: Avoid deferring to expert opinion when it seems likely to be the product of corruption, conformism, fear, or other influences apart from the relevant facts about the world.

We should not be impressed by the consensus view of pulmonologists employed by a tobacco company concerning the health effects of smoking cigarettes - or of biologists who are required, on pain of state persecution, to promulgate Lamarckism. In such cases, there are clearly factors in play which undermine truth-seeking, meaning that any resulting consensus is unlikely to be due to convergence upon the truth.

It is, of course, a tricky matter determining from the vantage point of a non-expert whether an entire field of inquiry has become hopelessly corrupted; there are, however, tell-tale signs. Perhaps the most important one is that a field has become epistemically sealed, in the sense of having been closed off to meaningful, legitimate criticism (by, for example, imposing — implicitly or explicitly — a kind of ideological litmus test on would-be members of the field, requiring that they pay lip service to the “party line” in order to enter it, in the first place).

---

5. Where Appeals to Authority Are Unwarranted

With respect to some domains, appeals to authority are simply unwarranted. I think that my own field, philosophy, is perhaps the paradigmatic example. The reason for this is that philosophers disagree with one another about almost everything - including about which methods we to be employed in order to resolve disagreements.

To be sure, if you want to know about the great problems of philosophy, or about what the great past philosophers have had to say about these problems, then deferring to the authority of professional philosophers is a good idea.

However, if you want to know the answers to the great problems of philosophy, deferring to the judgment of a philosopher is not wise because there are not generally-agreed-upon answers.

For the same reason, appeals to authority are illegitimate in fields such as macroeconomics and political science, wherein expert opinion is similarly divided (this is why, for example, it does not do for politicians to simply cite an economist who endorses some pet policy proposal: their opponents could do exactly the same).

With respect to one small, but crucial, domain, I think that we are, in effect, our own experts: namely with respect to those facts concerning the intrinsic character of our own conscious states. We do not need to consult experts in order to determine whether we are conscious. Even if (heaven forbid!) eliminative materialism one day becomes the consensus position among philosophers and cognitive scientists, we will still be able to know, immediately, that this consensus is mistaken (or so I believe, in any case). And we will always be the only ones who know immediately what it is like to be ourselves, from the inside.

This is not to say that we cannot be self-deceived in myriad ways: it is only to deny that anyone but oneself has access to the “what-it’s-like” property of one’s mental states. We are each our own (albeit, fallible) authorities with respect to that.

---

Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s this final point that I wish to stress more than the preceding ones. While the unthinking and reflexive dismissal of expertise is a problem of the current age, a greater one is the tendency to seriously underestimate the power and the authority of one’s own mind, which has the capacity to directly apprehend the eternal truths of logic, mathematics, morality, and metaphysics. Moreover, even third-person investigation by way of studying what experts have said depends upon trusting the power of one’s own mind, insofar as the former relies upon sensory experiences which are themselves mental phenomena. We must be willing to suppose, or at least to conjecture, that we are able to perceive immediately that our sensory experiences are of objects in the world in order to make any observations at all.