Three puzzles about skilled epistemic practices

Thank you to Marcus Arvan for providing me with the opportunity to discuss some ongoing research. My work is mainly in philosophy of cognitive science, and I'm interested in domains of higher cognition, especially how cognition and culture interact. I examine what underlies our ability to formulate ideas that seem arcane and remote from everyday life, such as in mathematics, science and theology.

For this series of blogposts, I am going to investigate skilled epistemic practices, by which I mean practices that require a great degree of skill and that are use to acquire knowledge within a given domain. For instance, birders can discriminate species of birds on the basis of subtle cues such as size, shape, colors, and habitat. Art appraisers can tell genuine artworks from fakes and place them within a chronological framework. Primatologists can see complex interactions between primates, including dominance hierarchies and aggressive and submissive behavior. Can we explain what is going on in such instances of skilled practice? 

The apparent effortlessness with which experts can use their skills in specialized domains has made it seem as if experts possess extraordinary, innate mental capacities for memory and attention to detail, epitomized by fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes.

However, an accumulating body of research on expertise, particularly in the domains of music, sports, chess and writing indicates that these superior capacities are restricted to the domain in which one is an expert, and do not transfer to other domains. For example, chess players have a better recall and wider visual span of chess positions, but their superior performance does not transfer to other domains of memory or visual attention. Experts are subject to the same cognitive limitations (including working memory) compared to other people; they process their domain of expertise more efficiently, for instance by chunking it in more manageable bits. Also, except for body size and height in some sports (such as basket ball and wrestling), innate capacities do not play a significant role in the development of expertise. You become an expert through the extensive learning period, not by some innate gift. 

Presently, the cognitive science of expertise is quite narrowly focused on what cognitive factors, such as deliberate practice, contribute to expertise. I’d like to take a step back and look at the broader picture, of how skilled epistemic practices can be characterized as a uniquely human way of acquiring knowledge. A better understanding of skilled epistemic practices has ramifications for philosophy of science (given that such practices are important in science) and metaphilosophy (given that philosophy also depends on skilled epistemic practices). 

There are three puzzles about skilled epistemic practices that I aim to address in particular: 

1. Unique phenomenology: Although they are hard and take a lot of practice to get a reasonable level of proficiency, skilled practice has a phenomenological sense of "naturalness". An art appraiser just "sees" that, say, an etching can't be an original Rembrandt, because it just doesn't look like Rembrandt's light-and-dark use. Yet this naturalness is not the same as automaticity, as experts retain high-level control on their skills. There is sometimes a peculiar sense of absorption, termed flow or recently, by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, conscious entrainment, that accompanies skilled (epistemic) practices. How do we explain this unique phenomenology?
2. Cross-cultural variability: Skilled epistemic practices differ substantially between cultures, in contrast to ordinary epistemic practices, such as using our senses in an everyday way, which are much more cross-culturally stable*?
3. Prima facie justification: It seems plausible that when the art appraiser thinks she does not see a Rembrandt etching, or the primatologist sees dominance hierarchies, they have some prima facie justification for these beliefs. From where does this derive? 

In a next blogpost I'll examine the general case of skilled epistemic practices, and offer a unified cognitive account that can account for these three questions. I'll then look at how these practices operate in philosophical thinking, and finally, I'll write about how they play a role in religious experiences. 

*There are some exceptions, such as susceptibility to visual illusions like the Müller-Lyer illusion

Comments

[Elisa Freschi]

Thanks for this stimulating post, Helen!
A few thoughts from a Sanskrit perspective:

1. The topic of the expert's perception is very much discussed in Sanskrit sources (the standard example being the one of the expert jeweller, who immediately recognises a real gem). The idea there is that their sense-perception has been enhanced and made more acute by repeated practice, so that, just like an athlete can spring higher than me, they can see more than I can. A related topic which is also intensely discussed are the limits of sense-perception (can one enhance one's sense-perception ad infinitum?).*

2. I am not sure that sense perception is so constant across cultures. Apart from the McGurk illusion (see here: http://elisafreschi.com/2015/03/25/is-there-non-processed-perception-the-mcgurk-effect/) one is reminded of the Tibetans' lack of distinction between green and blue and the variablity in the distinction among colours (different cultures acknowledge a different number of colours, both as distinct names and as the corresponding entities).

3. Right, they have some prima facie justification and all explanations are probably all a posteriori rationalisation. However, this could be the case for all epistemic enterprises (since extrinsic justification risks to be circular: What guarantees that the cognition justifying a previous cognition is justified?).

*For skeptics: you can find a discussion of the jeweller's case in a rough English translation in section 2.1 here: https://www.academia.edu/1735126/Ved%C4%81ntade%C5%9Bika_on_Intellectual_Intuition_yogipratyak%E1%B9%A3a_

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Elisa - thank you for your insights and the reference to the jeweler's case - I will check this out. About (2) I agree basic perception (what Reid called "original perception") is variable across cultures, lots of interesting Whorfian effects, for instance. Still, I'm wondering if one can't make the case skilled perception is more variable. But maybe it's better to see this at the individual level rather than the cultural level. For instance, I have difficulties distinguishing between 2 closely matching hues of blues which speakers of Russian will easily tell apart because they correspond to different basic color terms. But try as I might, I cannot tell a piece of colored glass from, say, a sapphire (or pick any gem resembling glass somewhat). I will deal with the problem of (3) in one of my next posts! The problem of circularity is indeed there - and it's a bigger problem than for basic perception, but I think it can be solved.

[Michel X.]

I'm afraid I don't have much to contribute, but I did want to sound a small cautionary note with respect to the art-expert examples, which do a fair bit of work marshaling intuitions. My reservation is this: I'm not sure that those really *are* cases of exercising a skilled epistemic practice. In fact, I rather suspect it's rather more like wine-tasting--i.e., total BS.

Now, to be fair, I'm not aware of any literature that definitively debunks the myth of expert opinion in the arts, but I *am* aware of several cases that cast some doubt upon it. One such anecdote comes from the case of Hans van Meegeren, who passed off his creations as original Vermeers; the "experts" in this case thought these were the finest of Vermeer's paintings (some were copies, some works of HvM's passed off as Vermeers). Another case is recounted in the documentary "Who the fuck is Jackson Pollock?", and chronicles the importance of provenance in art authentification, and art experts' resistance to physical evidence (or, perhaps, their faulty reliance on "expertise").

Art experts *might* do better than a 50-50 guess with Morellian analysis of fairly low-level forgeries, where close inspection can detect anachronistic details or techniques. Quality forgeries like van Meegeren's, however, would seem to call for forensic analysis instead. And both the van Meegeren and the Pollock cases I cited cast doubt on experts' abilities to make reliable judgements based on style and other such visible features of works.

I totally believe the other examples, though, and find the non-transferability pretty fascinating.

[Elisa Freschi]

I was so intrigued by the topic that I ended up dedicating a short post to it: http://elisafreschi.com/2015/07/10/expert-knowledge-in-sanskrit-sources/

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Elisa: Thanks so much! I just read your post - do you have, next to your blogpost, any articles on this that I could cite?

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Michel X - that's a good point (and people now wonder how anyone could have been fooled by van Meegeren - it does not look like Vermeer at all). Morellian analysis by itself does not work, and we need other tools (such as dating techniques), still, I regularly see art appraisers who are used to, say, assess whether a small etching found in an attic is by Rembrandt or by an obscure contemporary. Maybe appraisers do better with this sort of thing than with deliberate forging, in any case, one can be wary about whether skills are really reliable. I'm going to address this in one of my follow-up posts here

[Elisa Freschi]

thanks Helen! This discussion reminded me of an article I have never finished, so I just put it on academia (hoping that someone will steal it and free me from the responsibility of sending it for peer review and the usual stuff:-)) https://www.academia.edu/13882847/The_refutation_of_any_extra-sensory_perception_in_Veda_nta_Des_ika_a_philosophical_appraisal_of_Ses_varami_ma_m_sa_ad_MS_1.1.4

[Elisa Freschi]

A reader prompted me to signal a further source on extraordinary perception being reachable through continuous exercise of one's faculties:
http://elisafreschi.com/2015/07/13/expert-knowledge-in-sanskrit-texts-additional-sources/