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When Is Scientific Dissent Epistemically Inappropriate?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Boaz Miller
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Abstract

Normatively inappropriate scientific dissent prevents warranted closure of scientific controversies and confuses the public about the state of policy-relevant science, such as anthropogenic climate change. Against recent criticism by de Melo-Martín and Intemann of the viability of any conception of normatively inappropriate dissent, I identify three conditions for normatively inappropriate dissent: its generation process is politically illegitimate, it imposes an unjust distribution of inductive risks, and it adopts evidential thresholds outside an accepted range. I supplement these conditions with an inference-to-the-best-explanation account of knowledge-based consensus and dissent to allow policy makers to reliably identify unreliable scientific dissent.

Type
Social Epistemology and Science Policy
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 918 - 928
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

This article was written with the support of the Israel Science Foundation grant 650/18 for the project Skepticism about Testimony (principal investigators: Arnon Keren and Boaz Miller). I thank Kristen Intemann, Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, and David Kovacs for helpful feedback.

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