Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Volume 34 Issue 2

Issue of Analyse & Kritik

Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Page range: i-i

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Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Editorial

Page range: 193-194

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Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Entitled to Trust? Philosophical Frameworks and Evidence from Children

Caitlin A. Cole, Paul L. Harris, Melissa A. Koenig

Page range: 195-216

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Abstract

How do children acquire beliefs from testimony? In this chapter, we discuss children's trust in testimony, their sensitivity to and use of defeaters, and their appeals to positive reasons for trusting what other people tell them. Empirical evidence shows that, from an early age, children have a tendency to trust testimony. However, this tendency to trust is accompanied by sensitivity to cues that suggest unreliability, including inaccuracy of the message and characteristics of the speaker. Not only are children sensitive to evidence of unreliability, but they are also sensitive to the positive reasons a speaker may have for the reliability of their testimony. This evidence is discussed in relation to reductivist and non-reductivist viewpoints.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Moral Expertise

Karen Jones, François Schroeter

Page range: 217-230

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Abstract

This paper surveys recent work on moral expertise. Much of that work defends an asymmetry thesis according to which the cognitive deference to expertise that characterizes other areas of inquiry is out of place in morality. There are two reasons why you might think asymmetry holds. The problem might lie in the existence of expertise or in deferring to it. We argue that both types of arguments for asymmetry fail. They appear to be stronger than they are because of their focus on moral expertise regarding all-in judgments about rightness. We reject this emphasis on all-in judgment in favor of an account of moral expertise as typically multi-stranded and domain limited. This account of moral expertise is better able to address the problem of how to identify those who have expertise. It also offers a more nuanced picture of the contrast between accepting a moral claim on one's own and accepting it on testimony.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Comment on Karen Jones and François Schroeter

Alison Hills

Page range: 231-236

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Abstract

In this comment I defend my account of moral understanding and its role in morally worthy action and claim that a fully virtuous person would have moral understanding. This means that deference to moral experts is not always appropriate. But there is still room for a social moral epistemology, whereby moral experts pass on moral understanding.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Can There Be Such a Thing as Ethical Expertise?

Dieter Birnbacher

Page range: 237-250

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Abstract

Ethics in the 21st century is threatened by a split between practical philosophy as a full-blown academic discipline and applied ethics as pragmatic problem-solving inside the political process. The place of the professional philosopher sitting on medical and other 'ethics committees' as an 'ethical expert' is somewhere in between. But where exactly? How is his role defined? Is the expertise he brings to bear on practical decisions of a purely technical or of a substantially moral kind? These issues are discussed both 'from the outside' and 'from the inside'. First, some of the theoretical controversies surrounding 'ethical expertise' are discussed on the background of a rapidly growing literature in the field. These are then related to the realities of commission work as they confront the academic ethicist in practice.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Experts, Teachers and Their Epistemic Roles in Normative and Non-normative Domains

Comments on Dieter Birnbacher and Karen Jones & François Schroeter

Tobias Steinig

Page range: 251-274

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Abstract

Goldman's notions of expert and testimony in epistemological contexts are extended to normative issues. The result is a sketch of a conceptual framework: several types of experts and roles they can serve in informing not specially qualified recipients are distinguished; differences between experts in epistemological and moral contexts are highlighted. This framework then is the point of reference for claims about experts, expertise and moral testimony in Birnbacher's and Jones & Schroeter's contributions to this volume. First, Birnbacher's worries about the legitimacy of moral philosophers sitting as experts on panels, etc. are allayed in one respect and aggravated in another: there are roles and qualifications open to informants about normative issues, but it is doubtful whether moral philosophers per se are up to each of them. Secondly, Jones & Schroeter's objection to Hills's claim that moral testimony cannot orient its recipient properly towards right-making reasons for acting is faulty.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Moral Expertise and Democratic Legitimacy

Frank Dietrich

Page range: 275-284

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Abstract

In modern democracies, moral experts play an increasingly important role in law-making. Apart from the question of which competences characterize moral experts, their influence on the legitimacy of democratic procedures must be discussed. On the one hand, the contribution of moral experts promises to improve the quality of decision making. On the other hand, however, moral experts cannot claim to represent the will of the people. In this essay, at first a concept of the moral expert will be sketched which does without the assumption of a privileged access to 'moral truths'. Then a procedural understanding of democratic legitimacy without epistemic components will be defended. Finally there will be a distinction between the purely consultative and the quasi-legislative tasks of ethics committees. Whereas councelling by moral experts does not influence the legitimacy of democratic procedures, giving them quasilegislative functions is connected to risks in this respect.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

A Sociological Speculation about Law and Ethics

Michael Baurmann

Page range: 285-298

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Abstract

It is argued that ethics is undergoing a similar development in modern societies as law did in former times. If this development continues, it could be that in the future collective decisions in many areas will be justified by the application of ethical principles just as today judicial decisions are justified by the application of the rules of law. The paper describes some of the remarkable similarities between law and ethics in modern societies and considers possible causes of this development.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

How to Identify Moral Experts? An Application of Goldman's Criteria for Expert Identification to the Domain of Morality

Martin Hoffmann

Page range: 299-314

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Abstract

How can laypeople justifiably distinguish between reliable experts and unreliable experts? This problem, usually called the 'problem of expert identification', is highly debated in recent social epistemology. A great amount of work has been undertaken in order to find satisfactory criteria for identifying experts in different branches of the empirical sciences, but hardly in the domain of moral knowledge. This asymmetry between social and moral epistemology is the motivation behind my paper. I reconsider the epistemological problem of identifying moral experts by applying identification criteria developed in general social epistemology to the area of morality. As I will show, all of these criteria turn out to be inappropriate for identifying moral experts. This result seems implausible, because it conflicts with the observation that moral experts play an important role in public and scientific discourse, in ethics committees and boards. But this is not a real contradiction as I will illustrate by explaining which tasks these experts can, in my view, fulfill.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Simple Games of Information Transmission

Bernd Lahno

Page range: 315-338

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Abstract

Communication is an inherently strategic matter. This paper introduces simple game theoretic models of information transmission to identify different forms of uncertainty which may pose a problem of trust in testimony. Strategic analysis suggests discriminating between trust in integrity, trust in competence, trust in (the will to invest) effort and trust in honesty. Whereas uncertainty about the sender's honesty or integrity may directly influence a rational receiver's readiness to rely on sender's statements, neither uncertainty about the competence of a sender nor uncertainty about his willingness to invest effort has any direct impact on rational reliance on its own. In this regard, trust in honesty and trust in integrity appear to be more basic than trust in competence or effort.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds

Paul D. Thorn, Gerhard Schurz

Page range: 339-366

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Abstract

Meta-induction, in its various forms, is an imitative prediction method, where the prediction methods and the predictions of other agents are imitated to the extent that those methods or agents have proven successful in the past. In past work, Schurz demonstrated the optimality of meta-induction as a method for predicting unknown events and quantities. However, much recent discussion, along with formal and empirical work, on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as essential to maintenance of 'wise crowds'. This suggests that meta-inductive prediction methods could undermine the wisdom of the crowd inasmuch these methods recommend that agents imitate the predictions of other agents. In this article, we evaluate meta-inductive methods with a focus on the impact on a group's performance that may result from including meta-inductivists among its members. In addition to considering cases of global accessibility (i.e., cases where the judgments of all members of the group are available to all of the group's members), we consider cases where agents only have access to the judgments of other agents within their own local neighborhoods.

Comments on Paul D. Thorn and Gerhard Schurz

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds

Christian J. Feldbacher

Page range: 367-382

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Abstract

In their paper on the influence of meta-induction to the wisdom of the crowd, Paul Thorn and Gerhard Schurz argue that adding meta-inductive methods to a group influences the group positively, whereas replacing independent methods of a group with meta-inductive ones may have a negative impact. The first fact is due to an improvement of average ability of a group, the second fact is due to an impairment of average diversity within a group by meta-induction. In this paper some critical remarks to meta-inductive group expansion and replacement are made. In particular it is stressed that both ability and diversity are of equal importance to a group's performance.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Applying Formal Social Epistemology to the Real World

Carlo Martini

Page range: 383-398

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Abstract

The claim that diversity and independence have a net positive epistemic effect on the judgments of groups has been recently defended formally by Scott Page, among others, and popularized in Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. In Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds Thorn and Schurz take issue with the claim that more diversity and independence in groups leads to better collective judgments. I argue that Thorn and Schurz's arguments are helpful in clarifying a number of over-generalizations about diversity and independence that are often circulated in the social epistemology literature. I also argue that the relevant formal arguments are easily misunderstood when presented 'in a vacuum', that is, without a context of application in mind. I provide a different approach to understanding formal results in social epistemology: With the help of concrete scenarios and the formal literature, I focus on a trade-off between independence and dependence in groups. I show that the approach works well also for another principle in social epistemology; namely, the principle that 'more heads are better than few'.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Good Listeners, Wise Crowds, and Parasitic Experts

Jan-Willem Romeijn, Tom Sterkenburg, Peter Grünwald

Page range: 399-408

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Abstract

This article comments on the article of Thorn and Schurz in this volume and focuses on, what we call, the problem of parasitic experts. We discuss that both meta- induction and crowd wisdom can be understood as pertaining to absolute reliability rather than comparative optimality, and we suggest that the involvement of reliability will provide a handle on this problem.

Publicly Available February 11, 2016

Authors

Page range: 409-412

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About this journal

ANALYSE & KRITIK

is devoted to the fundamental issues of empirical and normative social theory
is directed at social scientists and social philosophers who combine commitment to political and moral enlightenment with argumentative rigour and conceptual clarity
develops social theorizing in connection with analytical philosophy and philosophy of science
promotes the dialogue between Anglo-American and Continental traditions in the social sciences and ethics
publishes articles in English

Volume 34 Issue 2

Issue of Analyse & Kritik

Contents

Editorial

Entitled to Trust? Philosophical Frameworks and Evidence from Children

Abstract

Moral Expertise

Abstract

Comment on Karen Jones and François Schroeter

Abstract

Can There Be Such a Thing as Ethical Expertise?

Abstract

Experts, Teachers and Their Epistemic Roles in Normative and Non-normative Domains

Comments on Dieter Birnbacher and Karen Jones & François Schroeter

Abstract

Moral Expertise and Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

A Sociological Speculation about Law and Ethics

Abstract

How to Identify Moral Experts? An Application of Goldman's Criteria for Expert Identification to the Domain of Morality

Abstract

Simple Games of Information Transmission

Abstract

Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds

Abstract

Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds

Abstract

Applying Formal Social Epistemology to the Real World

Abstract

Good Listeners, Wise Crowds, and Parasitic Experts

Abstract

Authors