Comment on Rational Me or We?

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:30:19 GMT

Internal credibility is of little use when we want to compare the credentials of experts in widely differing fields. But is is useful if we want to know whether someone is trusted in their own field. Now suppose that we have enough information about a field to decide that good work in that field generally deserves some of our trust (even if the field's practices fall short of the ideal). By tracking internal credibility, we have picked out useful sources of information.

Note too that this method could be useful if we think a field is epistemically rotten. If someone is especially trusted by literary theorists, we might want to downgrade our trust in them, solely on that basis.

So the two inquiries complement each other: We want to be able to grade different institutions and fields on the basis of overall trustworthiness, and then pick out particularly good experts from within those fields we trust in general.

p.s. Peer review and citation counting are probably incestuous, but I don't think the charge makes sense in the expert witness evaluation context.

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