WiP - Amy Flowerree / Undue Influence, Good Faith, and Expert Testimony
WiP - Amy Flowerree / Undue Influence, Good Faith, and Expert Testimony
Amy Flowerree from Texas Tech presents at our Work in Progress meeting, on the topic of "Undue Influence, Good Faith, and Expert Testimony." Her abstract is below.
Recent work has presumed that we epistemically ought to defer to experts when they clearly know more than us. Those who resist experts are irrational. I argue that is mistaken. Expert testimony is often defeated because powerful incentives exert undue influence. In the common imagination, undue influence defeaters abound: money, politics, social forces pressure experts into biased testimony. But not all influence defeats expert testimony (most experts are paid by someone). In this paper, I characterize undue influence and when it defeats expert testimony. Additionally, I develop an account of what the expert is doing when they testify in their capacity, and sketch a picture of what individual and group responses to this testimony should be.