These are anxious times for expertise. Competing claims about vaccine efficacy and mask mandates swirl in an increasingly chaotic online environment. Media coverage of ongoing crises routinely highlights the splintering of epistemic authority as a major issue in the fight against COVID-19, climate change and climate denialism, dangerous misinformation, and structural racism. All of these can reasonably be interpreted as crises of expertise, part of a larger rupture in supposedly established practices of truth and trust on which science, medicine, and public health depend. Whether or not such a prior paradigm of expertise existed (and there is reason to doubt that it did), our moment raises crucial questions about the nature and future of expertise. What is it like to be an expert?
The essays in this collection offer different ways of posing or answering this question. They consider the problem of expertise in its historical and ethical dimensions at...