The paradox of expert authoritarianism

The "I'm not a biologist" reductio ad absurdum

In the age of “fact-checkers” and the formation of super-censored social media (to protect us from “proto-fascist” hate speech and fake news), it can be useful to revisit this interesting notion of epistemic authority once in a while.

In other words, there are pertinent questions to ask around what truth is, how we discover, communicate and maintain knowledge thereof, and what relation all of this possibly can have to authority.

There’s much to be said about the problems inherent to an appeal to expert authority in these matters. Everyone knows it’s a famous informal fallacy with a classical pedigree, and everyone also knows that the categorical rejection of expert testimony is sophomoric at best.

But lately, things have veered into the opposite extreme such that authority, and an increasingly arbitrary framing thereof, has more or less come to substitute for warranted truth-claims in general.

There are many reasons for this. People lack conceptual tools for more complex critical thinking and exposition. We’ve had the last years of apocalyptic propaganda and fear-mongering which actualizes key psychological drives towards safety, and we’re faced with history’s most comprehensive and effective tools for mass coercion ever even imagined.

On top of that, “generative” AI has just recently begun acting as a force multiplier on top of the scientistic myths of objective and centralized knowledge manifest exclusively through the monolithic and superhuman gaze of technological civilization.

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All of this notwithstanding, there’s a fundamental paradox (or set of paradoxes) inherent to the principle of an excluding epistemic authority wielded by the expert - in other words, there’s a problem with the idea that the expert always can and should have the final say on any issue that falls under his or her purview.

On a general issue, there will be a set number of experts with relevant knowledge that might plausibly be considered authorities.

But since superior expertise implies greater epistemic authority, it’s also a given that we must establish an internal hierarchy of the relevant experts such that we can determine the most prominent one, whose enlightened despotism we then are bound to follow.

So on whose authority is this to be determined? Are we philosophers trained in epistemology and the general evaluation of evidence supposed to step in here? But then the same situation arises, and the arch-epistemologist must be crowned.

By whom? Yeah.

But let’s concede the point. Let’s go one step further and accept that the arch-expert has been discovered, hailed, crowned and enthroned. His word on the issue is law, since he’s the single most qualified source and must have the final say on every relevant question.

The problem then becomes that we can no longer even evaluate his authority in this context.

Since this expert (as per the expertocratic principle) is the final arbiter on everything concerning climate change or nuclear energy waste or whatever the matter happens to be, there’s no longer any external authority we can appeal to in terms of even evaluating the viability of this one expert’s input. He has the final say, and we might be interpreting all of the data erroneously (you can push this same problem forward to an infinite regress of external evidentialist meta-experts).

Hell, we’re not biologists, so we shouldn’t even express an opinion on the issue at hand.

But if this is the case, there’s no longer any warrant to accept the expert’s authority in the first place. It’s not even a matter of trusting in external testimony, because we’re not even competent to discern the relevant facts ourselves.

We don’t properly even know what the expert is testifying about, so we’d just have to trust in an empty signifier. But anyone can provide me with an empty signifier, so the arch-expert’s ostensible authority now completely lacks support.

At this point, someone might reasonably argue that we can’t take the issue this far. That it’s reasonable to defer to a consensus of competent experts and imbue them with final authority on highly technical and important issues.

Sure. Fine. But if we’re still trying to maintain the expertocratic princple, this solution compounds the problem. The question one whose authority this is valid still remains, whether or not we’re dealing with a set of experts or a single one, and this moreover adds a structural negation of the absolute equation of expertise and epistemic authority.

For if it’s acceptable to heed the opinions, analyses and conclusions of the lesser experts, where do we then draw the line between them and the non-experts?

If it’s a matter of the degree of knowledge, the cutoff becomes completely arbitrary, since even my dog knows something about the weather.

So this cutoff can either be set by an external expert authority, which reproduces the same problem again, or it can be decided democratically or otherwise, and in the latter case we’ve obviously already conceded epistemic authority to non-experts.

LOTS of other inextricable issues follow from this or similar principles.

How are conflicts between experts decided? Consensus obviously negates the expertocratic principle, so by external fiat? Then we’ve just reduced epistemology to authority.

How are boundary issues to be decided, i.e. where two disciplines make irreconcilable statements, as for instance when special relativity and quantum mechanics differ in their truth-claims and statements of fact?

And how, pray tell, is new knowledge ever to be apprehended, since if a question becomes detailed and specific enough (as every neophyte master student well knows), the range of viable experts shrinks until there’s really nobody who has yet studied the issue?

Nah. Let’s just toss this nonsense and return to debating arguments and evidence on their own merits through universal human reason, and with our own interests and values in clear and unambiguous view.

Let’s leave aside this childish deference to special interest groups, well-funded and domesticated experts chief among them.