Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b6zl4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T13:42:31.246Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What Scientists Know Is Not a Function of What Scientists Know

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

P. D. Magnus
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

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

References

Biddle, Justin, and Winsberg, Eric. 2010. “Value Judgements and the Estimation of Uncertainty in Climate Modelling.” In New Waves in Philosophy of Science, ed. Magnus, P. D. and Busch, Jacob, 172–97. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bogen, James, and Woodward, James. 1988. “Saving the Phenomena.” Philosophy of Science 97 (3): 303–52..Google Scholar
Brams, Steven J., Kilgour, D. Marc, and Zwicker, William S.. 1998. “The Paradox of Multiple Elections.” Social Choice and Welfare 15 (2): 211–36..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cariani, Fabrizio. 2011. “Judgment Aggregation.” Philosophy Compass 6 (1): 22–32..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, Heather E. 2009. Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartmann, Stephan, Pigozzi, Gabriella, and Sprenger, Jan. 2010. “Reliable Methods of Judgment Aggregation.” Journal for Logic and Computation 20:603–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartmann, Stephan, and Sprenger, Jan. 2012. “Judgment Aggregation and the Problem of Tracking the Truth.” Synthese 187 (1): 209–21..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, William. 1896/1948. “The Will to Believe.” In Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Castell, Alburey, 88–109. New York: Hafner.Google Scholar
Lemons, John, Shrader-Frechette, Kristin, and Cranor, Carl. 1997. “The Precautionary Principle: Scientific Uncertainty and Type I and Type II Errors.” Foundations of Science 2 (2): 207–36..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magnus, P. D. 2008. “Demonstrative Induction and the Skeleton of Inference.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (3): 303–15..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1990. Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Norton, John D. 2003. “A Material Theory of Induction.” Philosophy of Science 70 (4): 647–70..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinch, Trevor. 1985. “Towards an Analysis of Scientific Observation: The Externality and Evidential Significance of Observational Reports in Physics.” Social Studies of Science 15:3–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudner, Richard. 1953. “The Scientist qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments.” Philosophy of Science 20 (1): 1–6..CrossRefGoogle Scholar