Responses 002 (2010-2011)

This is the second expansion of my thoughts on the most recent list of questions. The second question in that list says, "How important are the opinions of experts in the search for knowledge?"

Of course, as most people would agree, you'd have to define 'expert' first, as well as 'important'. The word 'expert' was actually the adjectival form of the word 'experience' — it is the older form of the clunky 'experienced', now made into a noun. The word 'important' actually means 'having import (i.e., significance)'.

So what we're actually asking is, "How significant are the opinions of the experienced in the search for knowledge?"

I have a few thoughts here.

1. It depends on whether they are experts in the domain where you are searching; generally, those who are more experienced in one domain have more useful things to say about it.
2. On the other hand, remember what Arthur Clarke said: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." (Clarke's First Law, first published in Profiles of the Future, 1962.) This of course implies that expertise is only useful where experience has already been accrued; it is less useful when looking for something for which you have not much relevant prior experience, or which is contrary to prior experience.
3. To link this to logic, consider the problem of induction. In induction, you observe a pattern and derive a law. For example, you watch swans go by: black swan, black swan, black swan, black swan... ah, all swans are black. But just one pink swan will break your law. A swan expert could never predict a pink swan, because his expertise tells him all swans are black.
4. The problem of deduction, on the other hand, is that deduction proceeds from axioms — and axioms are foundational statements that are accepted without proof. An expert who is proceeding by deduction from rules could never conceive of a new axiom. It's like saying 'all black things are swans' and then seeing a raven; the axiom 'ravens exist' cannot be derived from a universe of swans, and so a raven must merely be a case of swan.

These thoughts, I suppose, lead to the conclusion that Clarke's First Law summarises the whole essay for the more convergent disciplines.

But what about the arts and humanities? I'd have to say that this is probably true of them as well. An expert can always tell you what has been experienced before and, on that basis, predict what will therefore be likely to occur in future. But this assumes the basis remains constant. For the arts, this is even more unlikely because the basis is emotional response; for the humanities, the basis is humanity and therefore vague where axioms are concerned.

So what do experts tell us about where to search next? The obvious major contribution is that experts can often tell us where we've already searched. That's why any paper or thesis normally includes a literature review — what the experts say or have said so far about the thing you are researching. Then you say why your research is different and goes to places where others haven't been before; you can also say how prior researchers have given you reasons or ideas for adopting this line of research.

And that's more or less what I think of Question 2. More to come later.