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Over the week, I have sketched three attempts to answer the questions: What is an expert? and How does someone become an expert? Though I’ve glossed over many details, the accounts point roughly to the following features of expertise:
Expertise involves extensive competence in a domain (including extensive tacit or explicit knowledge)....

Up to now, I have discussed only what might be called “objective” accounts of expertise. These try to explain the essential features of expertise without reference to how others think about experts. But it seems plausible to many that what others think...

Regardless of the plausibility of truth-based accounts of expertise, no one doubts that there are performative experts. We trust airline pilots to get us where we’re going, engineers to build safe bridges, and surgeons to perform complicated procedures...

There are two commonsense ways of thinking about expertise that trace at least back to Plato’s Statesman. The first is to think of expertise as performative: an acquired level of skill in a domain. This includes domains of crafts, like blacksmithing...