Judgement aggregation in scientific collaborations: The case for waiving expertise |
| |
Authors: | Alexandru Marcoci James Nguyen |
| |
Institution: | Hebrew University, Program for the History and Philosophy of Science, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel;School of Humanities and Liberal Studies, San Francisco State University, USA |
| |
Abstract: | The fragmentation of academic disciplines forces individuals to specialise. In doing so, they become experts over their narrow area of research. However, ambitious scientific projects, such as the search for gravitational waves, require them to come together and collaborate across disciplinary borders. How should scientists with expertise in different disciplines treat each others’ expert claims? An intuitive answer is that the collaboration should defer to the opinions of experts. In this paper we show that under certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, this intuitive answer gives rise to an impossibility result when it comes to aggregating the beliefs of experts to deliver the beliefs of a collaboration as a whole. We then argue that when experts’ beliefs come into conflict, they should waive their expert status. |
| |
Keywords: | Scientific rationality Judgement aggregation Social epistemology Collaboration in science |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录! |
|