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The Elusiveness of Consensus in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Steve Fuller
Steve Fuller*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

Consider Larry Laudan's (1984) recent statement of the role that consensus plays in scientific validation:

What makes the broad degree of agreement in science even more perplexing is the fact that the theories around which consensus forms do themselves rapidly come and go. The high degree of agreement, which characterizes science might be surprising if science, like some monastic religions, had settled upon a body of doctrine which was to be its permanent dogma. Consensus, once reached in those circumstances, could well be expected to sustain itself for a long period of time. But science offers us the remarkable spectre of a discipline in which older views on many central issues are quite rapidly and frequently displaced by newer ones, and where nonetheless most members of the scientific community will unhesitatingly change horses in midstream to embrace a point of view which may even have been mooted a decade earlier (p. 4).

Type
Part IV. Science Studies
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 106 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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