Why Democracies Need Science by Harry Collins & Robert Evans

Author:Harry Collins & Robert Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509509645
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

The consensus index

Consensus comes in different strengths. Knowing the degree of consensus is as vital for policy-making as knowing the substance. In deciding on degree of consensus, there is no escaping the difficult duty of drawing up a scale of ‘eccentricity’. We know that the many letters refuting the theory of relativity that every physicist receives, and which are sometimes distinguished by strange typographical conventions, are not to be taken into account as contributing to consensus-making or consensus-reducing within physics. Somewhere, there is a boundary between what is clearly outside the pale and what should be given more consideration. Background research is needed on the structure of scientific disagreement. Research on the classification of scientific mavericks is already underway, with physics as the topic of the research project.99 Nowadays, findings in physics are often first promulgated on an electronic pre-print server called ‘arXiv’, to which authors can upload their work before it has been subject to peer review. But arXiv has continuing trouble setting its boundaries: what are serious contributions and what are not? arXiv has had to establish a ‘general physics’ category for papers which have ‘fringe’ qualities but still have the other characteristics of a scientific paper and come from faculty members of universities. There are three boundaries within arXiv and at least two more outside it. There is the boundary that defines cutting-edge scientific expertise from run-of-the-mill publications. Then there is the boundary that defines all ‘refereeable’ papers. Outside of this are the papers reclassified into the low-status ‘general physics’ category. Still further outside are papers which are rejected, despite their having the form of a scientific publication. In respect of such a paper, a physicist remarked: ‘It’s professionally done.... The text is pretty good, the equations are mostly explained and the figures are clear. This man knows how to write a scientific paper.’ Such papers might finish up in ‘fringe’ journals or be self-published: of the paper in question, another mainstream physicist remarked ‘[the journal in which it was published] traditionally contains material that can’t get past (or even to) the arXiv stage of publication. It has either been rejected by peer review or expects to be.’100 The social science contribution is to understand the ‘ecology of the fringe’, making sure that nothing is too easily discounted, and making sure that wider groups do not think that, just because a publication has the form of a scientific paper and demonstrates some minimal scientific competence, it is something that ought to be taken seriously within the oral culture of science. Outside of this last boundary lies a range of unpublished materials running out to the ‘blogosphere’ of what are often referred to as ‘cranks’. The legitimating role of the social scientists might be most important here – stressing to those who see what looks like science on the internet that it is not necessarily so, despite the carefully crafted appearance.101

The research just described cannot lead directly to a decision about what should be ‘out’ and what should

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.