Lynne writes: With all due respect to Eugene and Sandy's posts, I do think there are members of this list who have expertise on "facts", bodies of literature in other disciplines, etc.
I have no doubt that Lynne is correct. But, insofar as we want to have a "meta" discussion (and maybe we don't, for very good reasons), it remains unclear exactly how one identifies someone who possesses "expertise"--is explicit graduate traing required, e.g.?--and, even more to the point, how one adjudicates conflicts between two people each of whom claims equal expertise. (This is slightly off topic, but I recall many people a couple of years ago who said that it didn't matter that Gov. Bush had no knowledge whatsoever of foreign policy because, after all, he'd be able to rely on "expert advisors." What they didn't acknowledge is that the "experts" might disagree, and then we'd be depending on Bush's .... (what, instincts, newly developed expertise, ....?)). Mark Tushnet many years ago coined the notion of "the lawyer as astrophysicist," by which he referred to the lawyer's tendency to believe that he/she could become an expert on *anything* given a weekend of hard study (though, of course, almost no lawyers believed that a non-lawyer could become an expert in less than three years of law school!). It is not false modesty that leads me, as I get older, to be more aware of what I don't know about facts in the world than what I do. sandy
