Notion Of Consensus Research Articles

Committees and Consensus: How Many Heads are Better Than One?

The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in the medical humanities, and suggests that the answer is a function of growing technological and professional complexity. The next two sections examine the concept of consensus analytically, citing some of the recent philosophical literature. The fourth section looks at committee deliberations and their desirable outcomes, and questions the degree to which consensus serves those outcomes. In the fifth and last section it is suggested that if I am to subscribe to a consensual outcome responsibly I must be personally committed to it, and that this requires a form of knowledge I call 'fiduciary', in this case knowledge of the competence and trustworthiness of other participants in deliberation whose expertise may have influenced my agreement.

Nigel Lawson's tent: Discourse analysis, attribution theory and the social psychology of fact

AbstractThe general aim of this paper is to show some of the limitations of the attribution theory approach to ordinary reasoning when compared to a discourse analytic alternative. Three central shortcomings with attribution theory are documented, each stemming from the method of presenting subjects with factual vignettes from which they are required to draw inferences: (a) its asocial and unexplicated notion of information; (b) its realist view of linguistic description; (c) its constrained account of participants' activity. These paws are illustrated in practice through a discourse analytic study of the management of factual versions in a political dispute (over a controversial briefing between a British politician, Nigel Lawson, and a group of journalists). Specifically, it focuses on ‘consensus information’, examining the way notions of consensus are used when warranting and undermining versions. Two features of consensus accounts are examined: (a) consensus across a group of observers of an event; (b) corroboration between independent individuals. In each case, the rhetorical organization of factual accounts is documented by analysing both the way the consensus is constructed and the way it is undermined or discounted. The analysis explores how the ‘facts of the matter’, rather than existing as criteria for the resolution of disputation, were themselves part and parcel of the disputation itself: In attribution theory terms, the clear distinction between ‘consensus information’ and the attributions which flow from it becomes unworkable. It is suggested that the analysis provides an exemplar for a discourse orientated social psychology of fact.

The median procedure for n-trees

Let (X,d) be a metric space The functionM:X k → 2 x defined by $$M(x_1 ,,x_k ) = \{ x \in X:\sum\limits_{i = 1}^k {d(x,x_i )}$$ is the minimum } is called themedian procedure and has been found useful in various applications involving the notion of consensus Here we present axioms that characterizeM whenX is a certain class of trees (hierarchical classifications), andd is the symmetric difference metric

The rhetoric of consensus

Abstract Bob Hawke has used the notion of consensus in three distinct ways. The term was first employed as a polemic to discredit the Fraser government and establish Hawke's claim to the ALP leadership. It then became shorthand for the political program Hawke put forward during the 1983 election campaign. Finally — and perhaps most ambitiously — it sought a new philosophical twist for Australian politics. By 1985, however, the concept lacked credibility and was quietly abandoned as polemic, program or government philosophy. The rhetoric of consensus, for all its success, was short‐lived in its usefulness.

Some problems underlying the theory of social representations

This paper critically examines Moscovici's theory of social representations. Four related difficulties are identified and illustrated drawing upon studies by Herzlich (1973), Di Giacomo (1980) and Hewstone et al. (1982). First, it is argued that the treatment of representations as coextensive with social groups is potentially circular and, second, that the broad notion of consensus across representations fails to distinguish important differences between levels (‘use/mention’, ‘theory/practice’). In addition it is claimed that not enough attention is paid to the relationship between social representations and specific contexts of use, and to the constitution of social representations in language. In response to these problems it is suggested that social representations be considered as ‘linguistic repertoires’.

Inefficient Unanimity

ABSTRACT The notion of consensus plays an important epistemological role in modern welfare economics, in that unanimous consent is a (unique) conceptual test for those changes that are ‘Pareto‐desirable’ (that is, make someone better off and no‐one else worse). In this paper, we seek to show that unanimous consent does not logically imply Pareto‐desirability—that a rational individual may fail to veto policy changes that make him/her worse off. The central element in the proof of this proposition is the observation that in social agreements involving a significant number of participants, any one individual's veto is decisive if it is the only veto. If the individual does not expect to be decisive, he will rationally exercise his vote ‘expressively’, and without sole regard to its consequences. When all individuals so act, a sort of prisoners' dilemma interaction may emerge, even under explicit consensus.

A Method for Cross-National Comparison of Political Consensus

^ NUMBER OF WRITERS2 on political behaviour have ; recently focused their attention on the degree of consensus £ Xnecessary to the maintenance of a stable democratic system. As an indicator of consensus, Lipset has suggested3 the extent to which all sections of the population react in the same direction to maior stimuli: for instance, a situation of low consensus would be said to exist where the left gains only among the workers while the right gains only among the middle classes. However) there are grounds for arguing that the notion of consensus is not quite so straightforward, or unidimensional, as this approach would suggest. It will be the purpose of this article to clarify two different implications underlying the notion of consensus, and to suggest a way of presenting cross-national comparisons based on voting statistics so as to bring out both of these implications. Data from Great Britain, Canada and Australia will be used in order to illustrate the method.