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Should We Aim for Consensus?

Episteme 7 (3):198-214 (2010)

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  1. The Fate of Knowledge.Helen E. Longino - 2002 - Princeton University Press.
    Helen Longino seeks to break the current deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science--academic battles founded on disagreement about the role of social forces in constructing scientific knowledge. While many philosophers of science downplay social forces, claiming that scientific knowledge is best considered as a product of cognitive processes, sociologists tend to argue that numerous noncognitive factors influence what scientists learn, how they package it, and how readily it is accepted. Underlying this disagreement, however, (...)
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  • Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
    How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.
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  • Groupthink_ versus _The Wisdom of Crowds: The Social Epistemology of Deliberation and Dissent.Miriam Solomon - 2006 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1):28-42.
    Trust in the practice of rational deliberation is widespread and largely unquestioned. This paper uses recent work from business contexts to challenge the view that rational deliberation in a group improves decisions. Pressure to reach consensus can, in fact, lead to phenomena such as groupthink and to suppression of relevant data. Aggregation of individual decisions, rather than deliberation to a consensus, surprisingly, can produce better decisions than those of either group deliberation or individual expert judgment. I argue that dissent is (...)
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  • Voting the General Will.Melissa Schwartzberg - 2008 - Political Theory 36 (3):403-423.
    Scholars exploring the logic of Rousseau's voting rules have typically turned to the connection between Rousseau and the Marquis de Condorcet. Though Condorcet could not have had a direct influence on Rousseau's arguments about the choice of decision rules in "Social Contract," the possibility of a connection has encouraged the view that Rousseau's selection of voting rules was based on epistemic reasons. By turning to alternative sources of influence on Rousseau--the work of Hugo Grotius and particularly that of Samuel Pufendorf--a (...)
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  • Reasonable Disagreement and Rational Group Inquiry.Marc Moffett - 2007 - Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4 (3):352-367.
    According to one widely held view, a belief is fully justified only if it holds up against the strongest available counterarguments, and we can be appropriately confident that it does hold up only if there is free and open critical discussion of those beliefs between us and our epistemic peers. In this paper I argue that this common picture of ideal rational group inquiry interacts with epistemic problems concerning reasonable disagreement in a way that makes those problems particularly difficult to (...)
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  • The place of self-interest and the role of power in deliberative democracy.Jane Mansbridge, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, David Estlund, Andreas Føllesdal, Archon Fung, Cristina Lafont, Bernard Manin & José Luis Martí - 2009 - Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (1):64-100.
  • On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation.Bernard Manin - 1987 - Political Theory 15 (3):338-368.
    This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.
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  • The Fate of Knowledge.Helen E. Longino - 2001 - Princeton University Press.
    "--Richard Grandy, Rice University "This is the first compelling diagnosis of what has gone awry in the raging 'science wars.
  • Habermas as a Philosopher. [REVIEW]Jurgen Habermas - 1990 - Ethics 100 (3):641-657.
  • Why Deliberative Democracy?Amy Gutmann & Dennis F. Thompson - 2004 - Princeton University Press.
    The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy?, they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement.What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and (...)
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  • Modelling collective belief.Margaret Gilbert - 1987 - Synthese 73 (1):185-204.
    What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue that group (...)
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  • Manipulating underdetermination in scientific controversy: The case of the molecular clock.Michael R. Dietrich & Robert A. Skipper - 2007 - Perspectives on Science 15 (3):295-326.
    : Where there are cases of underdetermination in scientific controversies, such as the case of the molecular clock, scientists may direct the course and terms of dispute by playing off the multidimensional framework of theory evaluation. This is because assessment strategies themselves are underdetermined. Within the framework of assessment, there are a variety of trade-offs between different strategies as well as shifting emphases as specific strategies are given more or less weight in assessment situations. When a strategy is underdetermined, scientists (...)
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  • Masking disagreement among experts.John Beatty - 2006 - Episteme 3 (1-2):52-67.
    There are many reasons why scientific experts may mask disagreement and endorse a position publicly as “jointly accepted.” In this paper I consider the inner workings of a group of scientists charged with deciding not only a technically difficult issue, but also a matter of social and political importance: the maximum acceptable dose of radiation. I focus on how, in this real world situation, concerns with credibility, authority, and expertise shaped the process by which this group negotiated the competing virtues (...)
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  • Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway - 2010 - Bloomsbury Press.
    The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. -/- Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and (...)
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  • On Liberty and Other Essays.John Stuart Mill (ed.) - 1991 - Oxford University Press.
    Collected here in a single volume for the first time, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government, and The Subjection of Women show Mill applying his liberal utilitarian philosophy to a range of issues that remain vital today - issues of the nature of ethics, the scope and limits of individual liberty, the merits of and costs of democratic government, and the place of women in society. In his Introduction John Gray describes these essays as applications of Mill's doctrine of (...)
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