David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Inquiry 46 (4):501 – 521 (2003)
Philosophers have often noted that science displays an uncommon degree of consensus on beliefs among its practitioners. Yet consensus in the sciences is not a goal in itself. I consider cases of consensus on beliefs as concrete events. Consensus on beliefs is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs constitute knowledge. A concrete consensus on a set of beliefs by a group of people at a given historical period may be explained by different factors according to various hypotheses. A particularly interesting hypothesis from an epistemic perspective is the knowledge hypothesis: shared knowledge explains a consensus on beliefs. If all the alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypotheses are false or are not as good in explaining a concrete consensus on beliefs, the knowledge hypothesis is the best explanation of the consensus. If the knowledge hypothesis is best, a consensus becomes a plausible, though fallible, indicator of knowledge. I argue that if a consensus on beliefs is uncoerced, uniquely heterogeneous and large, the gap between the likelihood of the consensus given the knowledge hypothesis and its likelihoods given competing hypotheses tends to increase significantly. Consensus is a better indicator of knowledge than "success" or "human flourishing".
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
No categories specified
(categorize this paper)
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
Boaz Miller (2013). When is Consensus Knowledge Based? Distinguishing Shared Knowledge From Mere Agreement. Synthese 190 (7):1293-1316.
Similar books and articles
Theresa Waynand Tobin (2005). The Non-Modularity of Moral Knowledge. Social Philosophy Today 21:33-50.
K. J. Zollman (2012). Social Network Structure and the Achievement of Consensus. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 11 (1):26-44.
Steve Fuller (1986). The Elusiveness of Consensus in Science. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986:106 - 119.
Jonathan D. Moreno (1988). Ethics by Committee: The Moral Authority of Consensus. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 13 (4):411-432.
Bruce Jennings (1991). Possibilities of Consensus: Toward Democratic Moral Discourse. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16 (4):447-463.
Peter Caws (1991). Committees and Consensus: How Many Heads Are Better Than One? Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16 (4):375-391.
Kyung-Man Kim (1996). Hierarchy of Scientific Consensus and the Flow of Dissensus Over Time. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 26 (1):3-25.
Nebojša Zelić (2009). Overlapping Consensus. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):101-115.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads31 ( #63,788 of 1,413,474 )
Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #155,015 of 1,413,474 )
How can I increase my downloads?