Reference reading
Arrogance
Expertise in making the work does not confer expertise in every question around it.
An inflated sense of one's importance or judgment that discounts correction and other people's standing.
Imagine this: An acclaimed sculptor brushes away a stagehand’s little measuring tape. The magnificent sculpture is already wedged halfway through a door.
How the pattern works
Arrogance inflates the authority of one’s importance or judgment. Accomplishment in one field becomes an entitlement to dismiss correction in another; a reputation for insight becomes evidence that an objection cannot matter. The person offering the measurement is evaluated by standing before the measurement itself is considered.
Creative work requires confidence, including the confidence to continue when an audience does not yet understand it. Arrogance is not that confidence. A confident maker can distinguish the artistic aim from a logistical fact and can learn from a person with less prestige. The distortion is the presumed immunity of one’s judgment from ordinary reasons.
What it costs the work
Useful information must negotiate a hierarchy before reaching the decision. Assistants and collaborators learn which truths are unwelcome, while the supposedly independent maker becomes dependent on a protected account of their own competence. Errors that could have remained small acquire ceremonies, explanations and expensive repairs.
A distinction worth keeping
Vanity needs admiration; Arrogance can despise the audience’s approval as unnecessary. Contempt denies another’s basic standing, while an arrogant expert may mainly overvalue their own judgment. A forceful argument, specialist knowledge or justified disagreement with a beginner does not establish any of these.
What a useful response can change
Identify the kind of question being answered. A decision about artistic form does not settle the width of a door, the accuracy of a quotation or the terms of another person’s consent.
A correction can be evaluated without first deciding whether its speaker has earned general authority. What does the tape measure show?
Acknowledging a limit can clarify where one’s actual expertise contributes. The sculptor need not abandon the sculpture to accept help installing it; collaborators need not pretend every judgment is equally informed to make relevant correction possible.
Questions for reflection
- Where has achievement become a reason not to listen?
- Which ordinary fact has been treated as an affront to status?
Other perspectives
Educational methods that pride themselves on being exclusively analytic or exclusively synthetic are therefore (so far as they carry out their boasts) incompatible with normal operations of judgment.
John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source
Dewey rejects methods boasting exclusive allegiance to analysis or synthesis. A favored competence becomes less useful when its claims exclude the other operations a judgment needs.
No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person's preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people's liking instead of one.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill distinguishes reasons from a preference multiplied by many people. A reputation or a confident circle cannot turn unsupported liking into an adequate argument.