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Free Will

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I’ve got to admit, I don’t understand all of the fuss about this concept. It seems like one of those topics philosophers like to argue about ad infinitum without any progress. Among non-philosophers, it seems there is a tendency to hastily reduce this to a binary distinction, while ignoring the fact that “Freedom” itself is a gradient and the “Will” is simply our capacity to interact with our environment in a non-arbitrary manner; it is a brute fact about ourselves. To me this is not a matter of classification, rather a question of degree under various conditions. If we think about the semantics of the lexemes involved in the phrase, it should be clear that “Freedom” is a type of degree-term or grade-term, with respect to a set of operational criteria. It can also be thought of as a rank-term, where each rank corresponds to an interval with gradeability from lower to higher; when the limit is reached there is a discontinuous jump into the higher rank. My whole point is that we ought t
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Expert Identification Problem

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Recently I've been reading  C. Thi Nguyen , along with  social epistemology more broadly, and have come across what's referred to as the expert identification problem. Here is the main idea: there is a difficulty of determining who genuinely qualifies as an expert in a given domain, especially when non-experts lack the knowledge or skills to make such a determination. This creates an epistemic asymmetry, there is an inherent epistemic gap between experts and non-experts. If non-experts had the expertise needed to evaluate an expert, they would, in a sense, be experts themselves. This creates a circular problem: non-experts are asked to identify who the experts are, but they lack the knowledge to do so effectively. I see this problem as three fold. We must first define critical aspects of "expertise", second we must identify the entities to which that label could possibly refer, and third we must establish criteria/heuristics/rules of thumb that allow us to minimize o
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