Misplaced Trust in Expertise: Pseudo-Experts and Unreliable Experts

The persistence of scientific misconceptions is often attributed to a decline in trust in experts. Against this simplistic picture, we emphasise that misplaced trust in expertise plays a crucial role in sustaining such misconceptions: even laypeople actively seeking expert guidance may nonetheless place their trust in unreliable sources. This paper identifies two main kinds of ’epistemic traps’ that are relevant to this phenomenon. In addition to fake experts who flaunt competence they lack (like pseudo-experts and pseudo-scientists), we emphasise the importance of unreliable experts who possess relevant credentials but systematically offer unreliable testimony. The resulting picture clashes with the commonplace idea that laypeople bear significant epistemic blame for endorsing misconceptions. Even responsible agents can be misled by unreliable experts who display legitimate credentials: the less evident the source’s unreliability, the less responsible is the agent for being misled.