Epistemic Privilege and Expertise in the Context of Meta-debate

I argue that Kotzee’s (Argumentation 24:265–281, 2010) model of meta-debate succeeds in identifying illegitimate or fallacious charges of bias but has the unintended consequence of classifying some legitimate and non-fallacious charges as fallacious. This makes the model, in some important cases, counter-productive. In particular, cases where the call for a meta-debate is prompted by the participant with epistemic privilege and a charge of bias is denied by the participant with social advantage, the impasse will put the epistemically advantaged at far greater risk. Therefore, I propose treating epistemic privilege as a variety of expert opinion specifically in cases where meta-debate participants come to an impasse in deliberation. My proposal exposes the problem of interpreting debate contexts as both adversarial and free from social power differentials.