Tobias Derschan
University of Vienna
In 2001, Alvin Goldman reinvigorated a debate in applied social epistemology: How can lay people identify and assess the trustworthiness of experts when they lack said expertise? Unfortunately, we are lay people in almost every context of our live and depend intimately on the knowledge of others. While trusting others is a ubiquitous exercise we engage in, this need not be blind trust. We give reasons and use heuristics to indirectly assess putative experts. The point of said philosophical debate is, then, to explicate those reasons and evaluate the non-ideal justifications to trust they can give us.
So far, this endeavour has mostly focused on experts in natural sciences and law, whereas social sciences like economics or related areas of cognitive expertise have seen scant attention. Therefore, I want to apply this question to the peculiar case of personal finance expertise. The latter is a matter of personal stake for many lay people, somewhat removed from academic economics and crowded with putative experts of questionable credibility.
Referring to the state of the art of both the philosophical and sociological literature, I intend to show how optimal lay assessments of personal finance experts differs from that in other kinds of cognitive expertise. Therefore, I will analyse lay strategies like assessing the speaker’s demeanour, institutional credits of the expert, the consensus structure of the proposition, predictive power, and others. The application will, further, require discussing the problem of macroeconomic forecasting, missing of reliable institutions and specific corruptive incentives.
Including inputs received at this conference, my final project will be complemented by a small empirical part. It ought to contrast real-world examples of how putative personal finance experts intend to signal trustworthiness with the kind information lay people would actually need to productively assess them.
Chair: Natalia Tomash
Time: September 8th, 14:00-14:30
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 