Epistemic trespassing of the sort I’ve noted is easy to recognize. Experts drift over a highly-visible boundary line and into a domain where they lack either the relevant evidence or the skills to interpret the evidence well. But they keep talking nonetheless. Experts on a public stage are cast in the role of the ‘public intellectual’ or ‘celebrity academic’. They may find trespassing all but impossible to resist. Microphones are switched on, TV cameras zoom in, and ‘sound bites’ come forth, coaxed out of the commentators by journalists. So what do you have to say about philosophy, Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what about arguments for the existence of God, Professor Dawkins? I don’t think trespassing is exclusively a problem for scholars in the limelight, however, and one of my goals here is to explain why ordinary researchers often risk trespassing, too.
Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing is ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognizing this will require us to be more intellectually modest.
I just discovered a new term, “epistemic trespassing”. This describes when an expert in one field makes claims in another field where they don’t have expertise.
Well known offenders include Linus Pauling, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Andrew Huberman, and Michio Kaku.
As a society I think we have too easily accepted accomplishments and expertise in one field as a signal of broad trustworthiness across domains. This is a big mistake, and we need to rethink it. 1/5
As for the term itself, I would personally prefer alternative terms like “expert overreach” or “epistemic arrogance”, because the “trespassing” part of the term implies gatekeeping. The inventor of the term, Nathan Ballantyne, clarified later that he did not condone gatekeeping. 2/5
Epistemic trespassers are thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless. We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders.
A few examples will guide our discussion. Linus Pauling, the brilliant chemist and energetic proponent of peace, won two Nobel Prizes—one for his work in chemistry, and another for his activism against atomic weapons. Later, Pauling asserted that mega-doses of vitamin C could effectively treat diseases such as cancer and cure ailments like the common cold. Pauling was roundly dismissed as a crackpot by the medical establishment after researchers ran studies and concluded that high-dose vitamin C therapies did not have the touted health effects. Pauling accused the establishment of fraud and careless science. This trespasser did not want to be moved aside by the real experts.