Reading the Signs: From Dyadic to Triadic Views for Identifying Experts

ABSTRACTA naturalistic approach to expert-identification begins by asking, ‘how do novices pick out putative experts?’ Alvin Goldman and Elizabeth Anderson, representing a fairly common approach, consider agents’ psychological biases as well as social situatedness. As good as this is, culture’s role in shaping cognitive mechanisms is neglected. An explanatory framework that works well to accommodate culturally-sensitive mechanisms is Peircean semiotics. His triadic approach holds that signs signify objects to interpreters. Applying the triadic model to expert-identification: novices interpret signs of expertise as pointing to particular experts. The main advantage of the framework is that it is significantly more nuanced than the Goldman-Anderson model in describing how agents identify experts. It explicitly accommodates cultural and agential differences in expert-identification. It also explicitly admits the possibility of rational disagreement in assessment of evidence for expertise. But these advantages come at a cost. Namely, it’s difficult in theory – as well as practice – to make one’s way into the semiotic system of someone from another culture to help guide them away from fraudulent experts. Even so, it’s a trade-off worth making since it organizes relevant details for expert-identification, which is a first step in sketching a better normative theory.KEYWORDS: Expert identificationcultural psychologyC.S. Peircesemioticsrecognition problem Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Examples of untrustworthy experts include sham epistemic authorities (Lassiter Citation2019) and epistemic trespassers (Ballantyne Citation2019).2. What makes an expert an expert isn’t necessarily the same as how novices identify experts. For instance, an excellent track-record could make A an expert in topic T, but there’s nothing about track-records in Anderson’s to-do list.3. These aren’t entailed by inside-out social epistemology, but they do fit naturally with the approach. Here is a brief sketch of how. Objectivism about Justification prohibits facts about justification from being grounded in community needs and interests, which (defeasibly) suggests that the justificatory facts are grounded in individuals. Non-natural Meaning is typically coupled with a story about discerning that meaning, which is usually conceptualized as an individual process. Finally, the sciences appealed to trend towards the individualist end of the spectrum, e.g. cognitive and social psychology. Again, none of these is entailed by an inside-out epistemology, but one can find these claims manifested in the work of Goldman and Anderson, as well as Martini (Citation2014).4. There are many ways to refine this position. I’m sticking with Boghossian’s formulation since it seems to capture what is common to other iterations of the idea. See Carter and McKenna (Citation2021) for an overview5. Another option is to seriously overhaul Methodological Naturalism and keep Objectivism about Justification by restricting the appealed-to sciences.6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.7. Chomsky puts it this way. Saussure’s distinction was between langue and parole.8. An anonymous reviewer notes that Peirce distinguishes between emotional, energetic (i.e. agentic), and logical interpretants. The same agent could feel pulled emotionally in one direction, moved to action in a different direction, and yet endorse a belief that looks in yet a third direction. I hope to use these in future work to develop even finer analyses. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.9. An anonymous reviewer asks whether a PhD in linguistics from MIT, a track-record of publications, and a tenured position at Harvard would signify expertise in linguistics. This intuition has a lot of pull, but once we start thinking about crowd-sourcing how signs signify across populations, it’s not obvious that this case does anything more than reflect the prejudices of folks with at least a four-year college degree.10. Apricity (noun, obsolete): the warmth of the sun in winter.11. This isn’t an unlimited tolerance and it varies with subcultures within the US. Even so, the tolerance is much greater relative to literally every other culture (Gelfand Citation2018; Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan Citation2010).12. The text of the speech is available at https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial13. It might also be that forward-looking considerations can help settle matters, e.g. what kinds of social goods are brought about by the belief. These are important too, but how those social goods are understood as goods is likewise (at least partially) mediated by signs. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.14. There is a lot of relevant work here, including developments in pragmatic encroachment as well as feminist epistemology.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCharles LassiterCharles Lassiter is associate professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University. His research focuses on issues in metaphysics and epistemology at the intersection of mind and culture.