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What Scientists Know Is Not a Function of What Scientists Know
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
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.
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- General Philosophy of Science
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association
Footnotes
Thanks to John Milanese, Heather Douglas, and Jon Mandle for comments on various parts of this project.
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