Three Criteria for Consensus Conferences

Consensus conferences are social techniques which involve bringing together a group of scientific experts, and sometimes also non-experts, in order to increase the public role in science and related policy, to amalgamate diverse and often contradictory evidence for a hypothesis of interest, and to achieve scientific consensus or at least the appearance of consensus among scientists. For consensus conferences that set out to amalgamate evidence, I propose three desiderata: Inclusivity (the consideration of all available evidence), Constraint (the achievement of some agreement of intersubjective assessments of the hypothesis of interest), and Evidential Complexity (the evaluation of available evidence based on a plurality of relevant evidential criteria). Two examples suggest that consensus conferences can readily satisfy Inclusivity and Evidential Complexity, but consensus conferences do not as easily satisfy Constraint. I end by discussing the relation between social inclusivity and the three desiderata.