Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of judgment aggregation in science. How should scientists decide which propositions to assert in a collaborative document? We distinguish the question of what to write in a collaborative document from the question of collective belief. We argue that recent objections to the application of the formal literature on judgment aggregation to the problem of judgment aggregation in science apply to the latter, not the former question. The formal literature has introduced various desiderata for an aggregation procedure. Proposition-wise majority voting emerges as a procedure that satisfies all desiderata which represent norms of science. An interesting consequence is that not all collaborating scientists need to endorse every proposition asserted in a collaborative document.

Highlights

  • Suppose a group of inquirers wants to announce the results of their research to the world: how should they decide what they declare to be the results of their investigation? Resolving this question is especially relevant as today the vast majority of articles found in peer-reviewed scientific journals are authored by multiple researchers (King 2013)

  • This paper addresses the problem of judgment aggregation in science

  • List and Pettit (2002) have proven an impossibility theorem which denies the existence of an aggregation procedure which satisfies universal domain, anonymity and systematicity; features of a judgment aggregation rule that may seem appealing in the context of scientific collaboration

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Summary

Introduction

Suppose a group of inquirers wants to announce the results of their research to the world: how should they decide what they declare to be the results of their investigation? Resolving this question is especially relevant as today the vast majority of articles found in peer-reviewed scientific journals are authored by multiple researchers (King 2013). List and Pettit (2002) have proven an impossibility theorem which denies the existence of an aggregation procedure which satisfies universal domain, anonymity and systematicity; features of a judgment aggregation rule that may seem appealing in the context of scientific collaboration. We claim that the philosophical objections regarding the kind of aggregation procedures suggested by formal models of judgment aggregation apply to the question of group belief rather than to the question of what to report, which is of independent interest from the perspective of social epistemology. We argue that proposition-wise majority voting can be a reasonable aggregation procedure for scientists to adopt when deciding what to report in a published unit (within a suitably restricted domain). The second case we consider is that with which this introduction began: the problem of collaborative publications

Collective Epistemology and Judgment Aggregation
The Role of Deliberation
The Role of Values
Desiderata for Judgment Aggregation in Collaborative Science
Completeness
Consistency
Deductive closure
Unanimity preservation
Anonymity
Systematicity
Universal domain
Possibilities and Impossibilities in Judgment Aggregation
Applying Our Proposal
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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