In Sense and Goodness without God I discuss the evidence ladder (section II.3): reason (logic and mathematics), empirical science, personal experience, historical facts, expert testimony, plausible inference, and pure faith. I show that faith is too unreliable to have any epistemic use, and that each succeeding method above it is more reliable than the one below. “Expert testimony” falls fairly low on the list because, though we need to rely on expert testimony, it still has a documented proneness to be wrong (and even more so in communities that trust it uncritically) and thus has to be subject to independent checks. Arrogance, overconfidence, error all remain problems. One of the ways to confirm an expert is unreliable is to find many instances in which fact-claims they make, which they should not be wrong about (things easy to ascertain that are directly in their field), are demonstrably false. Like a historian claiming we have more evidence for Jesus than for Alexander the Great. You do not have to be a historian to confirm that’s false; and moreover, to confirm there is no possible excuse for a historian to have gotten that wrong. You now know you can’t trust anyone who says that. Whatever expertise they might really have, they have completely abandoned it on that issue; it then counts for nothing.

I say a great deal more about how lay people can question, check, and vet expert claims in other articles here, most directly in On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus, and in various particular ways in my many running articles on Critical Thinking (I also teach an online course every month on how to get better at doing this). Sometimes it’s as simple as my last advice: pick some key claims an “expert” makes (not trivial or secondary claims, but central) that sound the most dubious, and deep dive them to see if they check out or not. Don’t fall for the fallacy “they made one mistake, ergo nothing else they said can be trusted.” Sometimes that’s not a fallacy, it depends on how large the mistake is (after all, “more evidence than Alexander” is really damningly bad), but usually you need several, and central, mistakes to confirm there is a predictable trend (as I point out in my Primer on Media Literacy). And sometimes other experts or good critical thinkers have already done this, and you can just benefit from their work if they’ve published it (even if only online), because then you can easily vet both the critic’s claims and the critiqued’s claims and see who is doing a better job of accurately telling the truth. But sometimes this may be impossible—there are, after all, things it takes years to master, and thus lay people will be stymied. Do they have to then just “trust” what the experts say? Not exactly.

It’s harder to vet such claims, but not impossible. Moreover, if they make other, more vettable claims that sound dubious or remarkable, you can always use those as your test cases, and if they don’t check out well, then you know you don’t have to heed anything else they say. Saves you time. But what if they do check out well? Then what? You may need to recruit the assistance of an expert. In which case you should do as much of the ground work as possible to prove to them you are serious and to thus also take up the least amount of their time, which will increase the odds they can spare time to help you with any final fact-check (see my advice in From Lead Codices to Mummy Gospels). For example, a long time ago Dan Barker paid me, then at least a grad student with certified translation competency in foreign languages, fifty bucks to “check” the German behind the English translation of three sentences supposedly uttered by Hitler. He set me up with as much information as he could muster; all he couldn’t do was verify the translations were sound, and not taken out of context. But I could. The rest is now history.

Another way to do it is to find out if there has been any expert debate or exchanges on the disputed point. Maybe with a reference librarian’s help at your local public; or even uni, college, or seminary library, many of which are open to the public—or at least maybe once the recent plague subsides; but in the U.S. a public library will set you up with anything through interlibrary loan, at most for a nominal fee, and often for free. But that task aside, suppose you end up confirming that some point has only been argued under peer review once, and has only been “rebutted” under peer review once, but then you find another peer reviewed work whose author not only sides with the original conclusion but even gives their reasons. What can you do then?

That is a much better situation to find than some expert just insisting you should trust their opinion, “because, expert.” In fact, unless they are actually uninterested in the subject and don’t want to waste their time, if they only ever answer such a question with “because, expert,” you might start to have sound reason to doubt them. Because a real expert can explain why they are certain of something. That is, literally, the only thing that makes them an expert. Hence a real expert who has the time and interest never needs to say “because, expert.” Because being an expert (or so they are claiming), they know what the data is and why it is convincing. Even if it requires groundwork of some kind to understand, they can articulate where to get started building that background knowledge. They can give you a meaningful bibliography. They can tell you what you could do to collect at least enough of the experience they have an abundance of to “see where that’s going.” So don’t put much trust in any expert who just keeps saying “because, expert” when asked why they are right or why they believe some thing that is being seriously debated. (And here by serious debate, I mostly but not only mean any debate whose both sides have been published under peer review by a respectable journal or press.)

The Case of Galatians 1:19

I was discussing with someone a completely different subject (how to evaluate an anthropologist’s claims about the science and history of economics, when you are not an anthropologist or an economist…long story). Thinking it over, I used the example of where sometimes lay people may be stuck: ancient languages. There often just is no way to get enough up to speed on that subject to reliably vet expert claims in it. My advice was to look for more vettable claims to test someone’s reliability by instead; leave the inscrutable ones aside. But one can also look for what experts have already said in a debate over some point, and anyone who has built their skill at critical thinking can then evaluate the debate between them. Which IMO should describe everyone: honing your expertise at critical thinking is even more important than knowing first aid or how to handle a gun, and this is coming from a strong advocate of responsible citizen soldiership. So if you aren’t there yet, get on this. It’s a skill that will improve your effectiveness in literally every single aspect of your life and thought, and is now essential to being a responsible citizen of any democracy. Preppers will just get rolled over by tanks. Genuine critical thinkers will keep the tanks from rolling.

It then ocurred to me I could teach this point with a neat example, involving—indeed!—ancient Greek language and grammar. The same way you can tackle this as a lay observer, you can deploy to vet any other expert dispute in any other field. The example I have in mind is what, actually, Paul says in Galatians 1:19. Now there are various skills and tools usable even by laypeople to get at and understand the underlying Greek (I teach those skills in my monthly online course in New Testament Studies for Everyone). But I’ll proceed here as if you haven’t mastered any of that—and rightly so I think, because this is such a difficult and esoteric matter (as you’ll soon see) that those tools and techniques probably wouldn’t help you here anyway. In any event, here’s the conundrum. The New King James (which is merely the original 17th century translation updated to 20th century English vernacular) claims Paul said “I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.” But the New International Version (which has been updated based on expert committee reviews of the original Greek and published scholarship thereon) claims he said “I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother.”

The difference is quite important: the first is saying this James was an apostle. The second is quite explicitly saying he was not. In other words, if the NIV is correct, Paul met only one apostle that day—Peter (Cephas in the Aramaic)—and some other Christian named James who was not of apostolic rank. Now, whether this still means he was biologically a brother of Jesus or only cultically, as all baptized Christians were, I won’t discuss today. You already know or can find my complete case for that in Chapter 11.10 of my academic monograph On the Historicity of Jesus. But one of the points I make there is that the NIV translation is correct; Bible translators had been errantly rendering the verse according to their faith-based assumptions, overlooking the fact that the grammar actually rules that out. And evidently, the NIV translation committee (experts all; albeit Evangelicals) agreed.

No, this does not mean the NIV is the most reliable translation. It still makes mistakes or translates on presumption or bias. All Bibles suck. They just differ in where they suck and how they suck, and just sometimes how often. As an expert myself I independently checked this case and concluded the evidence supports the NIV committee this time. But what if you aren’t an expert? How can you tell if that’s the case or not? Maybe the NIV altered their translation here to sandbag sectarian opponents (like the Catholics or the Copts). Just Google “New International Version vs King James” for lots of discussions of how they differ and why this might matter (and why the NIV isn’t always better).

In OHJ I put the case like this:

[W]hy didn’t Paul just say ‘of them that were apostles before me [1.17] I met none except Peter and James [1.18-19]’? Why does he construct the convoluted sentence ‘I consulted with Peter, but another of the apostles I did not see, except James’? As L. Paul Trudinger puts it, ‘this would certainly be an odd way for Paul to say that he saw only two apostles, Peter and James’. To say that, a far simpler sentence would do. So why the complex sentence instead? Paul could perhaps mean that he consulted with Peter (historeō) but only saw James (eidō)—that is, he didn’t discuss anything with James. But if that were his point, he would make sure to emphasize it, since that would be essential to his argument. Yet he doesn’t. In fact, if he is saying that he saw none of the other apostles, that would entail he was claiming he did not consult with any, either.

Carrier, OHJ, pp. 588-89

And:

In fact the Greek here is quite strange, unless Paul actually meant ‘other than the apostles I saw only James’, meaning quite specifically that this James was not an apostle. Ordinarily, to say you saw ‘no other apostle’ you would write heteron ton apostolon ouk (compare Rom. 7.23; 13.9; etc.) or oudena heteron tōn apostolōn (as Paul usually does: e.g. 1 Cor. 1.14; 2.8; 9.15; etc.) or things similar. But here Paul instead chose the unusual (and for Paul, unprecedented) construction heteron tōn apostolōn. Without oudeis, the word heteron plus the genitive in this fashion more often means ‘other than’, rather than ‘another of ’. Paul would then be simply classifying a meeting with ‘Cephas’ as a meeting with ‘the apostles’ (as anticipated in 1.17), and then making sure he named all the Christians he met on that occasion (Cephas and James) in anticipation of his claim that no one in Judea had ever seen him (1.22). The latter claim would be a lie if he had met any Christian, even one who was not an apostle, during his visit to Cephas (in 1.18). So Paul has to name all the Christians he met on that occasion. And, lying or not, that number needed to be low for his argument to hold. Accordingly, Paul says there was only one other: brother James.

Carrier, OHJ, pp. 590

The points I am making here about Greek vocabulary and grammar I could confirm myself, but I first encountered them in a peer reviewed paper in Trudinger (as I mention) that lays all this out, with examples demonstrating each point. If it were important enough, you could get ahold of that paper and read it yourself: L. Paul Trudinger, “[Heteron de tōn apostolōn ouk eidon, ei mē iakōbon]: A Note on Galatians I 19,” Novum Testamentum 17 (July 1975), pp. 200-202. Not only could you use a nearby library as suggested above, you could also get an annual Google Pass subscription to JSTOR (you don’t get access to everything in JSTOR but this is among those you could), which makes sense if you find yourself wanting to read a lot of peer reviewed work in the humanities like this, as a lot of it is accessible this way.

You’d also notice I cite in a footnote here another peer reviewed scholar concurring (more or less): Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Fortress Press, 1979), p. 78. Which is in the Hermeneia commentary series, in my opinion the most balanced and scholarly commentary series on the Bible that there is. Not wholly flawless or unbiased; but just compare one at a glance to any other commentary and you’ll see at once how much more academic and thorough they are, more concerned about questions of historical fact than sectarian ministry or exegesis. Betz thinks one could in theory read the text either way but he ultimately sides with Trudinger, concluding, “Apparently,” this James “was not regarded as an ‘apostle’ nor as one of the ‘twelve’.” I myself don’t think it can be read any other way, for the two reasons I cite: there are no examples in ancient Greek of the other sense in any construction suitably the same; and the sentence is inexplicably convoluted for such a sense to have been intended. If all Paul wanted to say was that he saw only two apostles, that’s what he would say. He wouldn’t employ this unusual complex grammatical construction; that he did, means he meant something by doing so. And there is only one thing he could have meant by doing so: the very thing Trudinger points out was often meant in Greek when doing so. Any other conclusion is apologetics against the grain of probability. And historians have no business arguing that way.

I searched the peer reviewed literature and found only one counter-argument to Trudinger, and duly mentioned it in OHJ: George Howard, “Was James an Apostle? A Reflection on a New Proposal for Gal. I 19,” Novum Testamentum 19 (January 1977), pp. 63-64 (also on JSTOR). Howard concedes every fact in Trudinger but argues one could and perhaps should still read this construction back the other way again, but he gives only two arguments for that, and as I remark in the corresponding footnote: “Howard’s first argument is refuted by the fact that both the apostles and James are of the same class (they are all Christians, which is precisely Paul’s point), and his second argument is refuted by relying on a premise of pure speculation that actually expects Paul to have written an even more convoluted sentence than he did.” Now this remark will really only be of use to someone who checks Howard and thus knows what I am referring to; but that was the point of it. If someone wants to check Howard and compare cases, then they’ll want to know why I am unpersuaded. Otherwise, my reasons for reaching the conclusion I do are fully stated in the main text. And not just several scholars but many translators agree with me (not just the NIV but the Berean Literal Bible, God’s Word, and Darby). So to come to a different conclusion requires more than just gainsaying or weak rebuttals. Howard is the only serious rebuttal that exists. So his arguments would have to be pretty good to overcome the arguments already presented. So if you aren’t yourself an expert, how can you know whether they are any good or not?

Applied Erisology

The study of arguments is called erisology. The basic idea is that you don’t have to be an expert in what’s being argued about; you just have to know how to evaluate arguments in general. You can think of it as a specific skill at evaluating debates. Normally people just “watch a debate” and make an intuitive decision as to who won or who was right (which many know are not the same thing). But what if you could carefully diagram what actually happened in the debate so as to see who actually presented the stronger case? That would be a function of erisology. Other functions of erisology include how to state arguments more efficiently and persuasively, how not to talk past each other in an argument, and so on. “Why did this guy fail to persuade that guy?” is a classic question erisology is all about answering. For an example, see John Nerst’s analysis of the Harris-Klein debate over whether it’s legitimate to suggest black people have on average lower IQs than white people (n.b. it may have once been legitimate to ask that question; but it’s no longer legitimate to pretend it hasn’t already been answered: see my discussion of Harris-Klein in Disarming the Motte and Bailey and of the Bell Curve argument in general in That Luck Matters More Than Talent). Rather than declare a side in that debate, Nerst wanted to analyze what happened in the debate, which is very instructive, and a good way to clear the fog for anyone who does want to know the right answer.

I went into an example of doing this for Galatians 1:19 before in Ehrman and James the Brother of the Lord. There I made the point that:

George Howard, the only person to answer Trudinger in the peer reviewed literature (OHJ, p. 590, n. 101), observed that the examples Trudinger referenced still involve “a comparison between persons or objects of the same class of things,” such as new friends and old friends belonging to the general class of friends, and indestructible elements and destructible elements belonging to the general class of elements. But that actually means Cephas and James belong to the same class (Brothers of the Lord, since Jesus is “the firstborn of many brethren…”), which entails the distinction is between Apostolic and non-Apostolic Brothers of the Lord, just as Trudinger’s examples show a contrast being made between destructible and indestructible elements and old and new friends. Howard’s objection thus actually confirms the very reading I’m pointing to. It thus does not in fact argue against Trudinger at all—who would agree both Cephas and this James belonged to the same class of things: Christians. Howard’s only other objection was to suggest Paul could have said James was not an Apostle by an even more convoluted sentence; when Occam’s Razor entails the reverse, that Paul would have said such a thing, had he intended to say such a thing, in a much simpler way, not a more complex one—after all, it would be far easier to just say “I met two apostles.” Exactly as Trudinger observes. (I discuss in OHJ several other simpler ways of saying the same thing than Howard suggests.)

Here I am spelling out my own reasoning, but this is actually something a non-expert could have done on their own, especially using my footnoted remarks on Howard in OHJ: they could read Trudinger and count the number of arguments he makes, write each down, then list the evidence he presents for each one (they don’t at this point need to know if any of these facts are true; all that’s happening here is writing down what the argument and evidence presented are); then do the same for Howard. Unlike timed debates, Howard is not prevented from including arguments and evidence by clock time, and these are serious scholars, taking each other seriously, making sober arguments in a peer reviewed publication, so you usually don’t have to worry that “something is left out.” You have the whole case Howard has to make here. Step one: cross off every point in Trudinger that Howard either agrees with or doesn’t challenge. Whatever you have left is the only material that matters going forward; that’s the only material in dispute. Notice that this “might” not be true (either scholar “could” be forgetting something or screwing something up), but all you have to go on is what these disagreeing experts do think to say, and what you want to do is evaluate which of them to trust given what you have—which is simply, what they thought to remark. That is, really, their job as experts, to make a complete case for their conclusion. So you are making use of the fact that they are experts here to leverage your own “non-expert” decision regarding their dispute.

Following this procedure, you’ll discover Trudinger makes yet more arguments than I mention, and they do carry some weight if not as great a weight. For example, he notes that Acts 1:14 distinguishes the brothers of Jesus from the apostles, thus demonstrating an early Christian assumption that they (who would include this James) were indeed not apostles. True enough. I could advance various reasons this could be in error or idiosyncratic or a shift in revisionist dogmas, and it doesn’t pertain to Paul’s own knowledge or the grammar he chose to employ, so it’s not that strong a point. But it is a relevant point. And it’s one to which Howard offers no reply. As another example, Trudinger cites numerous peer reviewed experts agreeing with him, which is also pertinent to note, but by itself it would simply devolve into a fallacy of argument from authority. We want to know if he and the experts he lists are right, or whether the experts (like Howard) against them are right, and we can’t decide that by merely listing scholars with like opinions. Despite Condorcet’s jury theorem, truth cannot be decided by vote—because we don’t know if everyone is voting as informedly or equitably. The very question we want to answer is which school of experts has the right end of the dispute; not that an expert dispute exists. We already know that.

But the most important information you’ll find are the two I myself rely on: it is not probable that Paul would choose a highly convoluted construction to say he met two apostles, whereas it is probable that he would do so to make a specific point that James was not an apostle (but that nevertheless he did meet him and thus must admit to the fact); and other instances of similar grammar in ancient Greek (though we have no exact parallel to assess) mean just as Trudinger finds, not as Howard wants, and thus it is the more probable that Paul means the same thing by using it here, as everyone else in ancient Greek meant by using a like construction in other contexts. Note in each case this is not saying it is impossible, but rather that it is improbable, which still carries a force you cannot pretend away. If you are asking what is the more probable, it matters what is the more probable. To act like it doesn’t is to commit the possibiliter fallacy (see Proving History, index), to argue “possibly, therefore probably,” which is a straightforward violation of logic, breaking the first law of logic, the law of identity, by falsely asserting that “possible” means the same thing as “probable.” And you do not need to be an expert to verify that.

So what does Howard have to say by way of rebuttal? He agrees with all of Trudinger’s evidence, and thus you can check that off as not in dispute. So you have both sides of experts confirming this to you; which means you don’t have to confirm it yourself, and thus you don’t need to learn ancient Greek to continue assessing this expert dispute. The two examples they both agree are being correctly presented and translated are a passage in Thucydides in which is said philous poieisthai […] heterous tôn nun ontôn, “to make friends other than the ones there are now,” and a passage in Pseudo-Aristotle in which is said stoicheion ousan heteron tôn tessarôn, on the indestructible ether “being an element other than the four” usual ones.

Now, I could tell you the reason these are correct translations of the Greek, even apart from the fact that contextually there can be no dispute as to the intended meaning in these two cases (that’s why Trudinger chose them). For instance, I could note that we have here the word heteron, “other,” followed by a statement in the genitive (the words ending in –tôn here), and the genitive in Greek takes a comparative sense in sentences that are making a comparison (see Smyth §1433 and §1434; and Liddell & Scott A.III.1.c.gen.), which is what Paul is most likely doing here. Because he did not say “x and y” (the obvious thing to say) but (oddly) “no x; but y” implying something is different between x and y, and even if that should be simply that one is Jesus’s brother and the other is not, that’s still a comparative statement, which is the grammatically relevant point here—remember, we are not here deciding whether James was or was not Jesus’s actual brother, but only whether he was at this time known as an apostle. Comparative sentence, invokes genitive of comparison. It’s therefore “other than” and not “another of.”

But that isn’t what you need here. You need to be able to evaluate whether arguments like this are sound, without yourself being expert in Greek. And what you have in this case is that Howard does not dispute any of this. And that’s all you need to know to then evaluate Howard’s actual rebuttal, which is not “Trudinger is reading the Greek wrong.” Instead, Howard’s argument is (sic): “the two examples given by Trudinger do not actually bear out the meaning which he ascribes to Gal. 1:19. Heteros in each instance makes a comparison between persons or objects of the same class of things,” e.g. as Howard explains, both objects of comparison in Thucydides are “friends,” and both objects of comparison in Ps.-Aristotle are “elements.” That is the only argument he makes from this observation. Yet it does not require you to be an expert to recognize that what I said as to this is true, that in Galatians 1:19 both objects of comparison are objects of the same class of things, “Christians.”

Cephas is also a Brother of the Lord (that appears to be Paul’s effective name for “Christians” at the time), but as all Apostles were known by definition to be Brothers of the Lord, just of rank, Paul does not need to double-identify Cephas as both. Just saying he is an Apostle, Paul’s readers already know he is also a Brother. By instead singling James out as only a Brother, he is making clear James was not an Apostle, but was still nevertheless a Christian. And this is what Paul’s convoluted grammar makes clear he was doing. Indeed that is the explicit point of the sentence: Paul needs to admit which Christians he met on that occasion, and is thereby forced to name and enumerate them—as you can determine yourself, no expertise required, by applying the same principles of erisology to the argument Paul is making throughout Galatians 1, up to and including verse 19 and after. So you can ascertain, without any expertise in Greek, that Howard’s statement about the facts is false. Cephas and James are of the same class. You therefore must cross that off as bearing no weight at all in the dispute. Score, zero.

Howard then gives two other enumerated arguments which amount to differerent variations of the same argument: that Paul could have written something else if he meant to say James was not an apostle. If you examine his wording carefully, Howard never gives any reason for supposing Paul would do so; all he does is assert the mere possibility. Which you need not be an expert to identify as a possibiliter fallacy. And fallacies are fallacies; they don’t suddenly become logical because an expert is saying them. So you could on your own already dismiss the remainder of his arguments as “non-rebttals,” as they actually contain no argumentation for the alternatives proposed, and thus do not in any actual way argue against Trudinger’s point.

This is clear even from basic logic, and therefore is clear even to a non-expert. But it is even worse for Howard, as the same principles of basic logic render this assessment even stronger when you look at what his “possible” alternatives consist of: in every single case, as you can ascertain yourself, they consist of an even longer and more convoluted sentence than Paul wrote. You again do not need to be an expert in Greek to know that no author is likely to do that (least of all a consistently efficient writer like Paul). It is already bad that Howard gave no reason to believe his alternatives were probable; it is worse that all his alternatives are in fact improbable. If Howard had given evidence that Paul consistently writes with otiose and convoluted grammar, then he could fend off that latter point, but he didn’t.

Of course, Howard didn’t, because he couldn’t: Paul’s style is actually exactly the opposite of that; in fact, the oddly convoluted structure in Galatians 1:19 is unusual for Paul, which is actually evidence that it must serve some purpose, and all published experts (including Trudinger and Betz and myself) have provided only one purpose that could be. Howard provides none, and thus he actually lacks an explanation for why Paul chose to write such an odd sentence for his usual style. But again, as a non-expert, you need not know whether what I just said about that is true to assess on which side of this dispute you should fall, because it simply remains the case that Howard gave you no reason to believe his “alternatives” are even probable, much less any reason to believe they are not improbable—and you already know it is generally improbable (and that’s again improbable, not impossible; but an improbability must still carry its force) for authors to prefer even longer and more convoluted ways of saying things. You may still find it interesting to hear from an expert like me why Howard couldn’t produce any evidence supporting his desired position on these points; but you don’t need to know that to notice he didn’t. And that’s that. Score, zero.

So, in the end, a non-expert might wonder how any English at all can render the bizarrely convoluted Greek that seems to go “other however of the apostles not did I see if not James” (heteron de tôn apostolôn ouk eidon ei mê Iakôbon). But there are many formulas in ancient Greek that have no direct one-to-one translation in modern English. We have to comprehend the sense, and then figure out in what words we would say the same thing in English. They might be quite different words, like “I didn’t see any other apostles. Only James” (i.e. “I did not [ouk] see [eidon] other [heteron] than the apostles [tôn apostolôn]; only [ei ] James [Iakôbon]”; note that Paul employs ei mê, in a way we can render in English as “only,” in a similar sense in verse 7). But without a command of Greek you won’t know for sure who’s giving you a sound translation, especially in cases like this where the grammatical elements and their arrangement are diverse and complex.

But what you can know, even as a non-expert, is what even the experts who disagree with each other are saying: Howard does not dispute that Trudinger’s translation would be correct but for Howard’s claim that Galatians 1:19 is not comparing objects of the same class; so once we realize it is comparing objects of the same class, Howard’s only objection to Trudinger’s translation evaporates. All that remains is Howard insisting Paul could have said the same thing differently (albeit even more convolutedly), which is not really an objection to Trudinger, but a kind of speculative counterfactual about other ways Paul could have written the sentence, devoid of any actual argument that he would have or even would be likely to. Which even a non-expert can see is a non-argument. In this dispute, therefore, you can tell which expert is right—without yourself having to be an expert.

Conclusion

This treatment may have been useful for assessing this one issue in Jesus and Biblical studies. But what I hope you can get from it is a general set of principles for how to evaluate any expert dispute without yourself having to be an expert. You do need some skills—basic logic, critical thinking, a command of English (or whatever language you find a debate to be in), the ability to break down an argument to its structure and essentials (to, as Galen once put it, “repeat the arguments back in your own words”)—but these are skills every citizen of the world should devote themselves to building competency in. Indeed they are skills you need in whatever subjects you yourself are an expert in anyway (whether that’s flipping burgers, knitting, or physics), and they are skills that can be applied to every domain of human knowledge, inquiry, and dispute. They are therefore the most important skills to have. But once you have them, even at a basic level, you can do what is described here, anywhere.

Which is:

  • Find out what all the experts’ arguments are in a given dispute—steel-manned, which often means, look for the arguments that have survived peer-review, or failing that, look for the arguments that appear to you the best; and you can always ask around, especially of people whose judgment you already trust, where the best arguments are. (And if there are quite many arguments, start with what you deem the most important or persuasive one, and work down from there until you’re satisfied on where things are going.)
  • Then, outline those arguments so you can enumerate each one separately.
  • Then, under each, list the evidence cited in support of it.
  • Then cross off everything neither side is disputing, and see what is left.

If what remains includes logical fallacies (like arguments from possibility passed off as arguments for probability), cross them off, too. And if what then remains is just gainsaying over some fact (“Peter and James are not members of the same class of things” against “Peter and James are members of the same class of things”; or “there is more evidence for Jesus than for Alexander the great” against “there is less evidence for Jesus than for Alexander the great”), check the fact yourself. If checking that fact requires expertise you don’t have, then you may need to get more experts involved in helping you understand who isn’t telling the truth. But often you can fact-check most plain assertions yourself. And if need be, catching one side giving false information or relying on inaccurate premises—especially if they do it more than once, or more egregiously than trivially—can be enough to distrust them in the dispute as a whole. So if that’s all you can do, then you can always pick for vetting fact-claims you can get at, so as to assess each side’s general reliability. But you’ll be surprised how often you really can fact-check and logic-check experts’ claims outside your field, if you do it competently (for some examples I think anyone could have nailed this way without my help, see, besides the one I just surveyed here, The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History and Shaun Skills).

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