On 1/19/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
What is your definition of an "expert"?
It's a difficult question, I think in part because there are two definitions of 'expert' which are related but distinct.
I offer myself as an example: I am an undergraduate student of mathematics. I've completed all of the undergraduate courses required for a B.S., and a few graduate courses as well.
Am I an expert? Probably not. There are many people with much more knowledge than I have about math; in particular, most everyone with a higher-level degree, and most people who work with particular subsets of math in other fields.
But, do I have a large amount of /expert knowledge/? Indeed I do. I've studied things that you probably wouldn't learn without specifically trying to learn them. I probably know more about combinatorial designs and rook theory than any hundred random people off the street. Probably some of those hundred would know more than I do about history, or languages, or welding, or any number of other topics.
So, the question that remains is: at what point does a person stop simply having expert knowledge, and become an expert? I don't know the answer to that; perhaps there is some invisible line that reads 'experts only past this point.' Certainly one standard would be that a person is an expert if other people consider them an expert: it's a good approximation of the system we use, I'd say. Whether it's a good system, I'll leave for others to decide.
Tracy Poff