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What Scientists Know Is Not a Function of What Scientists Know

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

P. D. Magnus
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Abstract

There are two senses of ‘what scientists know’: An individual sense (the separate opinions of individual scientists) and a collective sense (the state of the discipline). The latter is what matters for policy and planning, but it is not something that can be directly observed or reported. A function can be defined to map individual judgments onto an aggregate judgment. I argue that such a function cannot effectively capture community opinion, especially in cases that matter to us.

Type
General Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 2013 , pp. 840 - 849
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to John Milanese, Heather Douglas, and Jon Mandle for comments on various parts of this project.

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