The Problem of Expert Appraisal: Metacognition and the Rationality of “Thinking for Yourself”

Abstract

In our current age of hyperspecialization, we often turn to experts to help us settle many of our important questions. But faced with uncertainty of when to trust experts and which ones to trust, we are led to ask, when and to what extent is it rational for novices to think for themselves? In response, I will argue that 1) there are some specific cases where the novice would not be rational in deferring to expert judgment, 2) but that for most others, the rationality of thinking for oneself becomes doubtful ultimately due to problems of metacognition, and 3) that this does not support the pessimistic conclusion that that the novice is essentially “blind” in her trust of experts. Ultimately my aim is to defend the novice’s rationality in thinking for herself even in difficult cases of expert deference, and against the claim that such deference cannot be rationally grounded. In Section 1, I develop a more realistic understanding of expertise and highlight cases where the novice would be rational in thinking for herself when there is empirical evidence of expert unreliability. In Section 2, I show that even in deferring to experts, novices must still think for herself by engaging in some degree of inquiry about which source and expert to believe. Although second-order appraisal strategies have been proposed to guide this inquiry, they ultimately run into problems concerning metacognition. In Section 3, I argue against Neil Levy’s (2024) pessimistic argument that these problems render the strategies unemployable and that the novice cannot be rationally justified in thinking for herself via their use. I then propose further strategies the novice may use, how this may be incorporated into the Boost program, and conclude by suggesting further avenues for future research.