The Judgement of the Scientific Community

Abstract

AbstractFollowing Chapter 4, it is argued that the best judgement of the evidence belongs to the scientific community. Some suggestions are made concerning how the individual might go about ascertaining, and critically assessing, the judgement of the community. It might be objected that sometimes the community judgement goes wrong. A famous case concerns the community attitude towards continental drift between 1915 and 1965. Does this show that the scientific community cannot be trusted to judge the weight of evidence in a given case? It is argued that a distinction can be drawn between cases such as this, and many contemporary cases where we really should trust the judgement of the scientific community when they tell us that a given scientific claim is factual, beyond reasonable doubt. Put briefly, we should look for a scientific consensus amounting to at least 95 per cent, in a scientific community that is large, international, and diverse.