What Scientists Know Is Not a Function of What Scientists Know

Philosophy of Science 80 (5):840-849 (2013)
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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

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P. D. Magnus
State University of New York, Albany

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