Critical judgment of work in any given field has little value unless it comes from someone who is an expert in that field.

It is not always easy to find a way to assess a work. Judging some decisions, expressing a valuable opinion on a certain subject is an instance that needs some consideration. In fact, opinion coming from different people can, often, have importantly different values. More specifically, the attitude of a novice toward a certain matter is to be considered discretely from an expert's one. In my opinion, it almost always true that expert do have more authority in judging a work in their field, but it is not correct that interesting judgment can only come from experts.

First of all, it seems wise to spend some words on the term "expert". As a matter of fact, this expression properly refers to those figures that, thanks to professional experiences, studies or personal past, are to be assigned with central roles in the process of judging something in their field of expertise. Aligning to this definition, it is undoubtedly clear that their opinion is, generally speaking, of great value. Think about ancient philosophers: in the ancient Greece, well-renowned people like Socrates had a noticeable number of followers who literally walked with him across Athens. In his field, Socrates is who we would call an expert. In fact, his activity simply consisted in talking with his sort of students and judging their speeches, as to teach them how to achieve a perfect reasoning chain by the means of their words and minds. No other people could give a more valuable opinion on those arguments: Socrates furnished his cadets with the only valuable opinions.

Because the author of the above sentence states that his thought is valid in "any given field", it is natural to ask: does this ancient Greece apply to any area of human works? The answer, not easy to give, is more likely to be positive but with exceptions. In fact, if we analyse two totally different fields like economics and arts, we are only apparently dissimilar circumstances. In economics, how could anyone deny that an expert, or at least an experienced man, is needed to take some crucial managing decision? And while in arts it could be said that everyone can give a personal judgment that is just as valuable as that of an expert (because, they would argue, it is art, and as such, it is not as technical-demanding as economics), this proves dramatically deceiving. A plethora of critics spend a considerable amount of time studying arts, and, of course, even in this apparently open to fledglings field, experts' opinion does make or break the judgment.

All this notwithstanding, some areas of work can see novices or totally inexperienced people give an influent opinion. One instance for this is psychology, where, in some experiments and researches, children have to express themselves about some specific topics, and their position about those arguments are of incommensurate value for pundits. Hence, it can be maintained that, in some specific occurrences like the one just exposed, individuals who are not experts of the same field can nonetheless substitute the role of an experienced man and sometimes it is even not possible to do the contrary. Namely, it happens that no expert can be put in the place of an unbiased person.

In conclusion, experts do play the pivotal role in the definition of the quality of a work. In fact, they are called experts properly because their opinion has substantial bases that make them more crucial than other's opinion. This is a particularly generally-valid occurrence, as examples in fields like art and business prove. Nonetheless, inexperienced people can still give an interesting twist to the whole judgment of a piece of work, as stated with the example of children.