Competence and rationalityABSTRACT: I explore the connection between competence and rationality. I first make explicit the philosophically dominant view on this connection, that is, the “expert consultation” view. This view captures the rather obvious idea that a rational way to proceed on an important issue when one lacks knowledge is to consult experts. I will then list the difficulties that plague this view, locating them to some extent in the current philosophical literature on competence and rationality. I therefore propose to draw different lessons in terms of rationality from the fact of competence. The first is that some empirical and phenomenological studies on the nature of competence can be fruitfully applied by analogy to rational agent theories. Chicken sexers exist. It is a fact that there are experts in this and many other areas. It is also a fact that some philosophers, often epistemologists, believe that the fact of competence is linked in one way or another to rationality. The standard articulation of this connection is that a rational way to proceed on an important issue when one lacks knowledge is to consult experts. But does this view capture the full significance of the fact of competence for rationality? In this article I will argue that the fact of competence has an importance that goes beyond the standard view for the analysis of rationality. I will proceed by first considering the standard view in more detail, and then departing from that discussion to draw a different lesson for our understanding of rationality from the fact of competence. It would seem that the connection between expertise and rationality is as obvious as being trivial: when one has no experience on a certain important issue, and there are people who have such experience and who can be consulted without excessive costs, then (ceteris paribus) one should consult such people. This prescription connects competence and rationality through expert consultation. When our cars are kaputt, when our teeth hurt, when the soufflé collapses, when our French is not up to scratch, and when our affairs lack efficiency, we consult the appropriate experts to believe and behave in sufficiently non-arbitrary ways to be counted as rational. Consulting experts is therefore a resource for rationality: we have the remarkable cognitive capacity to let the outcome of consulting experts influence what we believe. (1)The previous paragraph captures in a simplified way the strong idea that the link between competence and rationality is that of consulting experts.