The Social Epistemology of Consensus and Dissent

Abstract

This chapter discusses the attribution of consensus to an epistemic community and reviews accounts of knowledge-based or epistemically justified consensus. It addresses consensus as an aim of inquiry and the normative status of dissent and also reviews computational models of consensus. Qualitative methods for identifying consensus require extensive manual labor, and their outcome depends on researchers’ subjective judgment in classifying papers. In an essential consensus, a group forms a collective decision for the same thing using shared standards of evidence and sense of relevance. In an accidental consensus, individuals form the same belief on and for their own reasons. Empirical evidence about the epistemic performance of deliberative models of consensus is mixed. Knowledge-conducive accounts of consensus assume that consensus is an aim of inquiry. A. Tucker gives another social account of knowledge-based consensus. Tucker identifies several conditions under which shared knowledge is the best explanation of a consensus.

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