Amateur Expertise and Post-Fordist Learning: A Response to Lassiter

Responding to Charles Lassiter's reply "Rejected Experts and the Foundations of Epistemic Authority," this article extends the account of expertise begun in "The Rejected Expert and the Knowledge's Half-Blood." Accepting Lassiter's use of McDowell's "second nature" and Wittgenstein's "form of life," the author distinguishes the regulative aspect of expertise (its identification) from the constitutive one (its formation), and clarifies that his earlier claims concerned identification, not the collapse of epistemic authority. He then distinguishes three ideal types of Knowledge's Half-Blood and defends the possibility of amateur expertise: under post-Fordist pressures toward continuous learning, self-learning and metaexpertise (learning to learn), some non-professionals -- citizen scientists, citizen humanists, independent researchers -- move from handling knowledge to producing it. The crisis of epistemic authority is thus read not as an irreversible collapse but as a re-constitution of expertise, giving rise to a new, culturally institutionalized "form of life."