When Expert Judgment Fails: Epistemic Trespassing and Risks to Collective Inquiry

In this talk I will first discuss the role of two social-epistemic reasons that have remained overlooked in the discussions on expertise: higher-order evidence and inquisitive reasons. Using this account of expert judgment, I will examine the phenomenon of epistemic trespassing, which happens when individuals engage in areas outside their expertise. While recent discussions in social epistemology have emphasized harms of epistemic trespassing in the context of public assertions, how trespassers may affect collective inquiry has been comparatively less explored. To address this question, I will present an agent-based model that simulates the involvement of trespassers in the scientific inquiry and their impact on the collective knowledge acquisition. The first part of the talk is based on joint work with Will Fleisher and Daniel C. Friedman; the second part is based on joint work with Matteo Michelini.

Dunja Šešelja is a Professor for Social Epistemology and Reasoning in Science at the Institute for Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum (RUB). Together with Christian Straßer she leads the Research Group on Reasoning, Rationality and Science at RUB. She serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science. Her areas of expertise are social epistemology and philosophy of science, in particular formal modeling of scientific inquiry, social epistemology of scientific disagreements and controversies, and integrated history and philosophy of science.

Einen Zoomlink stellt Svenja Goetz (s.goetz@campus.tu-berlin.de) auf Anfrage zur Verfügung.