Einstein once said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” So let’s start answering the question by breaking it down. Firstly, let’s take out those 3 iffy words (important, experts, and opinion.) and replace them with laymen’s terms. Importance is defined usually by how much a something ‘matters’ in the grand scheme of things. Experts are people who have more experience than most in a particular field or skill. And opinions, via the Princeton dictionary, are defined as “a personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty.” The question now reads: How much do the personal beliefs or judgments of experienced people, in one area, matter in the search for knowledge?
The opinions of experts are handy
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If a health expert tells you that Americans are getting fatter what proof does this expert have? They may be a doctor or might not be. If they believe that Americans are getting fatter and something should be done about it, the claim might interest you. It could make you think more about the problem and incite curiosity into a certain field, but if you were another doctor and you were doing a study linking high fructose corn syrup to an increase in weight in Americans the opinion would not help your study. It may draw attention to it but it often won’t lead to anything factual (or anything that can be classified as knowledge). The opinion of an expert will only serve the knower in a way to incite interest and thereby activating the knower’s reasoning and it’s then up to the knower to decide whether or not to pursue the information any further and attempt to validate or falsify the …show more content…
Their passion for a subject may overcome their ability to be subjective on it. For instance, Al Gore was long considered an expert on Global Warming and incited numerous people to support the adoption of ethanol into the gas supply. He later admitted when new evidence had arisen that he was wrong and ethanol was not an intelligent idea to get behind.
Experts are only good in there domain area of expertise. If you call in an expert, possibly a gardener, to fix your car the results would not be wondrous. In this way expert opinions are only important in the Areas of Knowledge that they study and very rarely cross over. An expert’s opinion in the Arts and Ethics areas of knowledge are often more feeble because ‘knowing’ in these areas is generally determined by personal emotion rather than reason or language like
Recently an article titled “A Grizzly Answer for Obesity” (Corbit, 2014) featured in the op-ed section of The New York Times. Through the course of the article its author Kevin Corbit - a senior biotech scientist - talks about the possibility of human gene mutation to solve the ever growing problem of obesity. The author’s objective is to reach a wide audience with no specialist knowledge in the field of genetic transitions. Kevin has extensively used elements such as language, structure, evidence and assumptions to shape the reader’s opinion. In the following essay I would specifically examine the usage of language and evidence employed by the author. Despite the presence of numerous examples of fallacious comparisons the author has perfectly used the language to his advantage and is successful in reaching a convincing conclusion.
As the rising epidemic of obesity has attracted considerable media attention, so has the promotion for maintaining healthy wellbeing. Tom Naughton’s documentary, Fat Head, is a stellar model of this media attention. It examines the exact cause of weight gain, and the reliability of the Government’s nutritional guidelines. The contention of Fat Head is that the U.S Government and Morgan Spurlock (the creator of Super Size Me) present misleading information. However, Naughton’s bias becomes apparent through the careful selection of film techniques, and the silencing of certain characters, who may express opposing viewpoints. The ideal audience of this documentary, parents and concerned parties such as medical professionals, are invited to agree that the U.S Government and Spurlock are deceptive.
In “The Death of Expertise” the author, Tom Nichols, expresses his concerns and fears about the ignorant public and their views on experts and the things they are experts in. Nichols states that, in today’s society, a backlash of hate and anger will ensue when the public is faced with an “assertion of expertise.” Nichols argues that people resent the thought of being wrong or different opinions “altering their own thoughts and changing the way they live.” Nichols states that even though everyone has equal rights, not everyone is an equal expert, which the public does not receive well. Nichols voices his worries about the “death of the expert” the bridge that separated the experts from the general public has collapsed and with it the idea that the experts know what they are talking about. The idea Nichols is trying to convey is not the “death of actual expertise,” instead what he fears had died is “any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.” (Nichols, 1) There will always be experts in various fields; however people have stopped listening to them in order to protect their own opinions.
Traditional ethical theories see emotion as a way to arrive to a means of reason and rationalistic moralities. Emotions are a very important component of the ethics of care and embrace rather than deny them during the calculations of morality. Prevalent ethical theories distinguish public life from private life within the household when no such distinction should be made.
Cahn, Steven M. and Peter Markie, Ethics: History, Theory and Contemporary Issues. 4th Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Thiroux, J. P., & Krasemann, K. W. (2009). Ethics: Theory and practice (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Our emotions greatly influence how we process information and make moral judgments. We take these emotional feelings and turn them into information about our situatio...
"Treating Obesity Vital For Public Health, Physicians Say." Science Daily. 2006. Web. 10 May 2014. .
Recently my daughter was writing a persuasive paper for a college class. Her thesis was that "Blue is a better color than red". Oh really? That may be true for me, and not true for you, because that is just a matter of opinion, or context, but it is not true in the greater sense of the word truth. The complexity comes when we forget that something isn't true or untrue "just because I want...
On the other hand, the authors propose that the other way of assessing information is similar to the bandwagon approach we learn in high school. Any time I think of the bandwagon concept I hear my mother asking “if your friends jumped off a bridge would you jump too?” I thi...
The different theories on emotions arose in the 3rd century B.C. at the time of Ancient Greece and Ancient China. While the western philosophical studies labeled emotions in many different ways. According to Aristotle to have virtue it is necessary to have emotions, as its important ingredient. As a result of different attempts made emotions were given importance and studies were performed in an analytical way in the 19th century (Suchy, Yana 2011) (Aristotle).
In Hume’s view, the judges allow for reasonable critiques of objects. Hume also pointed out that taste is not merely an opinion but has some physical qualities which can be proved. So taste is not a sentiment, but a determination. What was inconsistent in the triad of commonly held beliefs was that all taste is equal and so Hume replaced the faulty assumption with the true judges who can guide society’s sentiments.
emotions. In a bid to reveal this, the philosophers investigate the nature of the two to define
...elieve knowledge is extremely important as it also plays an enormous role in imagination. Without knowledge being shared, brilliant minds would not able to improve upon current situations. If Bill Gates had no knowledge in computing, knowledge that he acquired from other people through education, he would not have developed the Microsoft computer. The knowledge acquired from other sources fed his mind into imagining and developing the Microsoft computer.
Ethics is the study of moral values and the principles we use to evaluate actions. Ethical concerns can sometimes stand as a barrier to the development of the arts and the natural sciences. They hinder the process of scientific research and the production of art, preventing us from arriving at knowledge. This raises the knowledge issues of: To what extent do moral values confine the production of knowledge in the arts, and to what extent are the ways of achieving scientific development limited due to ethical concerns? The two main ways of knowing used to produce ethical judgements are reason, the power of the mind to form judgements logically , and emotion, our instinctive feelings . I will explore their applications in various ethical controversies in science and arts as well as the implications of morals in these two areas of knowledge.