Four Components of Expertise

Abstract

This paper aims to extend the concept of expertise, with a focus on its application to polymathy studies and to the three elements of polymathy: depth, breadth and integration. Departing from Herling’s (2000) "Operational definitions of expertise and competence", in which he outlines three basic components of expertise (knowledge, problem-solving, and experience), I propose a more sophisticated differentiation that involves four types of knowledge: (1) Epistemic Knowledge; (2) Tooled Knowledge; (3) Idiosyncratic Knowledge; and (4) Meta-Knowledge.