From expert testimony to laybelief: a Bayesian view

Modern societies are crucially dependent on the opinion of experts. The asymmetric relationship between experts and non-experts poses many socially impactful problems that have been subjected to the lens of different disciplines, including philosophy of science, social epistemology, argumentation theory, cognitive science, and psychology. In this paper, we focus on one fundamental problem that lies at the intersection of these approaches: how lay reasoners should update their beliefs in some hypothesis or claim H given that some expert asserts that H. We will approach this question from the perspective of Bayesian epistemology, following a recent trend that applies Bayesian models to represent, clarify, and manipulate traditional concepts in all of the above-mentioned areas