Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
definitions, experts can be anyone from a tradesman to a biochemist, though Ballantyne and others who have written on the topic mainly focus on academic fields. Trespassers, whether they be acting in the guise of the public or within their domains, are at least somewhat ignorant of the information, practices, and discussion of the field they’re venturing into. In a sense, trespassing is analogous to speaking on a culture that you were not raised in. You don’t understand the culture’s practices, traditions, or the history that fostered them. The only way to solve this problem is to envelop yourself in the culture and become acquainted with .it Ballantyne offers this same solution to trespassers. If you’re unfamiliar with a field but would still like to provide your input, then familiarize yourself with it and become a multimodal expert. Another option is to adopt “intellectual modesty” and realize you cannot make confident assertions within a field that isn’t yours. Trespassers don’t always want to adopt modesty, though, and three possible defenses for trespassing are presented: (D1) the field I’m trespassing into doesn’t have any evidence or skills that are pertinent to my claim on p , (D2) the evidence from my field is enough to establish that p is true, (D3) the skills from my field can be “transferred” to the other field. 6 D1 is dismissed by appealing to the fact that an agent would need to properly understand the skills and evidence of another field to determine whether or not they affect the claim they want to make. Essentially, they’d need to be an expert themselves. D2 is dealt with by saying that a problem of that nature simply isn’t interdisciplinary. Lastly, D3 is an unsuitable defense, because experts overestimate their skill transfer and underestimate how much background knowledge, they need to effectively apply their skills.
6 Ballantyne, 379.
Volume VIII (2025) 37
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker