Resumen de Expertos y autoridades en la práctica argumentativa
The appeal to the authority of experts is nowadays difficult to avoid when public decisions about complex matters have to be taken. This kind of argumentation is also widely used to support our academic papers. Several critical questions are usually associated with the so called ‘appeal to expert opinion’ argumentation scheme in order to critically asses the validity or the cogency of it. Those questions, if raised by an opponent in a discussion, have the property of shifting the burden of proof so that the arguer may repair or withdraw her proposal. But looking at the argumentations as communicative acts we realize that this is not the usual reaction when presented with an ‘appeal to expert opinion’ in many discussions. Communication goes fast and to critically assess everything that is said would be uneconomical and implausible. Besides, in many communicational settings we are in no position of questioning the authority because we don’t have the necessary knowledge about the matter and, also, because, maybe, the claim proposed by the authority is coherent with our system of beliefs. Even in those cases in which we don’t accept the claim, instead of questioning the expert, we may look for another expert in order to support an alternative option. In this work we present several examples of the inadequacy of the standard list of questions linked to the ‘appeal to expert opinion’ argumentation scheme to conclude that any descriptive enough model of argumentative practice has to include elements of the communicative context and of the audience. The usual analyst’s point of view doesn’t explain how we deal with real arguments in practice, because ordinary argumentations have to be assessed in a definite social setting in order to improve them.
