Experts, Epistemic Authorities, and the Problem of Public Exposure

According to a popular view, experts are paradigmatic examples of epistemic authorities: that is, people whose testimony we should believe because they are better epistemically positioned than we are to get things right on the matter at stake. This chapter aims to dismantle this popular view by demonstrating that being an expert is neither necessary nor sufficient for one to be an epistemic authority. The argument against the necessity claim builds upon a distinction between the two key epistemic activities in a community: producing knowledge and disseminating it across its members. I argue that being an expert is not necessary for one to be an epistemic authority because the ability to produce knowledge in a domain is not required for disseminating information across the community. The argument against the sufficiency claim is grounded in an analysis of a largely underestimated phenomenon: expert public exposure. Drawing on examples of public experts failing to share their knowledge with the wide public, I demonstrate that being an expert is not sufficient for one to be an epistemic authority. The ability to produce knowledge does not ensure that one can effectively disseminate it to a wide audience. The concluding sections address who should be responsible for knowledge dissemination if experts lack this ability. Two possibilities are critically examined: relying on dedicated knowledge disseminators and engineering the notion of an expert so as to require that they develop public communication skills.