Abstract
A consensus in a scientific community is often used as a resource for making informed public-policy decisions and deciding between rival expert testimonies in legal trials. This paper contains a social-epistemic analysis of the high-profile Bendectin drug controversy, which was decided in the courtroom inter alia by deference to a scientific consensus about the safety of Bendectin. Drawing on my previously developed account of knowledge-based consensus, I argue that the consensus in this case was not knowledge based, hence courts’ deference to it was not epistemically justified. I draw sceptical lessons from this analysis regarding the value of scientific consensus as a desirable and reliable means of resolving scientific controversies in public life.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 15-33 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Foundations of Science |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Mar 2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
Funding
I thank Joseph Berkovitz, Jim Brown, Anjan Chakravartty, Arnon Keren, Laszlo Kosolosky, and Anat Leibler for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal for helpful comments. This paper was partly written when I was an Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa. I am grateful to the Azrieli Foundation for an award of an Azrieli Fellowship. I am also grateful to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, the Dan David Foundation, and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, for postdoctoral fellowships.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Azrieli Foundation |
Keywords
- Consensus
- Expert testimony
- Science and policy
- Science and technology studies (STS)
- Social epistemology