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- Aviezer Tucker (2003). The Epistemic Significance of Consensus. Inquiry 46 (4):501 – 521.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".No categoriesReading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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CONSENSUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES Various atomistic and individualistic
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Many contemporary human rights theorists argue that we can establish the normative universality of human rights despite extensive cultural and moral diversity by appealing to the notion of overlapping consensus. In this paper I argue that proposals to ground the universality of human rights in overlapping consensus on the list of rights are unsuccessful. I consider an example from Islamic comprehensive doctrine in order to demonstrate that apparent consensus on the list of rights may not in fact constitute meaningful agreement and may not be sufficient to ground the universality of human rights. I conclude with some general suggestions for establishing the universality of human rights. Instead of presuming the universality of human rights based on apparent overlapping consensus we need to construct universality through actual dialogue both within and between communities.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... It is widely believed that bringing parties with differing opinions together to discuss their differences will help both in securing consensus and also in ensuring that this consensus closely approximates the truth. This paper investigates this presumption using two mathematical and computer simulation models. Ultimately, these models show that increased contact can be useful in securing both consensus and truth, but it is not always beneficial in this way. This suggests one should not, without qualification, support policies which increase interpersonal contact if one seeks to improve the epistemic performance of groups.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper, I challenge Laudan's recent attempt to ground the distinctiveness of science in its consensus formation patterns. I argue that Laudan's model is more appropriate to a forensics tournament than to an activity with the complex organizational structure of science. After reviewing several more realistic models of consensus formation, I conclude that there is no reason to think that any strong sense of consensus of belief is ever present in science, though there have been periods such as the eighteenth century, when various beliefs could find expression in a common scientific language of Newtonian mechanics.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Consensus is commonly identified as the goal of ethics committee deliberation, but it is not clear what is morally authoritative about consensus. Various problems with the concept of an ethics committee in a health care institution are identified. The problem of consensus is placed in the context of the debate about realism in moral epistemology, and this is shown to be of interest for ethics committees. But further difficulties, such as the fact that consensus at one level of discourse need not imply consensus at another, oblige us to look more closely at the deliberative process itself. That yields two complementary methods of deliberation that have proven their worth. Finally, placing ethics committees in the context of Dewey's philosophy of social intelligence suggests that consensus should be regarded primarily as a condition rather than as the goal of inquiry. Keywords: ethics committee, consensus, moral authority CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The concept of consensus is often appealed to in discussions of biomedical ethics and applied ethics, and it plays an important role in many influential ethical theories. Consensus is an especially influential notion among theorists who reject ethical realism and who frame ethics as a practice of discourse rather than a body of objective knowledge. It is also a practically important notion when moral decision making is subject to bureaucratic organization and oversight, as is increasingly becoming the case in medicine. Two models of consensus are examined and criticized: pluralistic consensus and overlapping consensus. As an alternative to these models, the paper argues that consensus refers to the dialogic aspects of a broader normative conception of democratic moral agency. When the preconditions for that dialogic democratic practice are met, consensus has a justificatory role in ethics; when they are not, consensus, as distinct from mere agreement, does not emerge and can have no moral authority. Keywords: applied ethics, bioethics, consensus, contract theory, democracy, discourse ethics, liberalism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in the medical humanities, and suggests that the answer is a function of growing technological and professional complexity. The next two sections examine the concept of consensus analytically, citing some of the recent philosophical literature. The fourth section looks at committee deliberations and their desirable outcomes, and questions the degree to which consensus serves those outcomes. In the fifth and last section it is suggested that if I am to subscribe to a consensual outcome responsibly I must be personally committed to it, and that this requires a form of knowledge I call ‘fiduciary’, in this case knowledge of the competence and trustworthiness of other participants in deliberation whose expertise may have influenced my agreement. Keywords: collective decision-making, committees, consensus, fiduciary knowledge CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The paper considers the problem of how a distributed system of agents (who communicate only via a localised network) might achieve consensus by copying beliefs (copy) from each other and doing some belief pruning themselves (drop). This is explored using a social simulation model, where beliefs interact with each other via a compatibility function, which assigns a level of compatibility (which is a sort of weak consistency) to a set of beliefs. The probability of copy and drop processes occurring is based on the increase in compatibility this process might result in. This allows for a process of collective consensus building whilst allowing for temporarily incompatible beliefs to be held by an agent.
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| | Scholar | More options ... During the last few years, several sociological accounts of scientific consensus appeared in which a radically skeptical view of cognitive consensus in science was advocated. Challenging the traditional realist conception of scientific consensus as a sui generis social fact, the radical skeptics claim to have shown that the traditional historical sociologist's supposedly definitive account of scientific consensus is only a linguistic chimera that easily can be deconstructed by the application of different interpretive schema to the given data. I will argue in this article that such an idealistic conception of scientific consensus results from the radical skeptics' failure to take into account the following three factors that are central to the historical sociologist's narrative account of consensus formation: the "judgmental" character of the reconstruction of scientists' beliefs, the hierarchical nature of the consensus change in science, and the importance of the "temporal dimension" in the explanation of scientific consensus formation. To substantiate these three points, I will draw extensively on two recent historical-sociological studies of scientific consensus formation.
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| | Other links: pos.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Rawls’ idea of overlapping consensus is crucial for the public justification of a political conception of justice in modern democratic societies. While overlapping consensus is mostly understood empirically, in the first part of this article we argue that a normative interpretation is more appropriate. Moreover, we try to show that Baccarini’s proposal of qualified consensus, in contrast to an assumed empirical reading, actually exploits the potentials of a normative reading. In the second part, we concern ourselves with the epistemological implications of a normative understanding of overlapping consensus or, more precisely, with the issue of epistemic deontologism. If we claim that consensus should be understood as agreement about not already existing beliefs and reasons, but about beliefs and reasons that citizens should acquire, it can be argued that this implies a thesis about voluntary control over beliefs. We try to show that a normative reading can be compatible with strategies based both on doxastic voluntarism and doxastic involuntarism.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Aviezer Tucker, The epistemic significance of consensus
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