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Part of
Science and Democracy: Controversies and conflicts
Edited by Pierluigi Barrotta and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 13] 2018
► pp. 35–52

Chapter 2
Rational decisions in a disagreement with experts

In a ‘post-truth’ society, expert opinion in public decisions is often taken to be of minor impact. This paper considers recent developments in collective epistemology about group decisions, arguing that a general assumption of recent trends to be called as the Summative View makes them insufficient for responding to this problem properly. At least two important aspects are missing from the accounts discussed: a diversity of relevant expertise, and the fact that disagreement implies debating, the latter making a dialectical account applicable to the situation. I shall build mainly on the latter line, discussing different notions of rational movements in a debate that can occasionally make prima facie irrational decisions to be rational.

Keywords: post-truth, expert opinion, collective epistemology, disagreement, summativism, argumentation, dialectics, pragma-dialectics, strategic manoeuvring, rationality
Article outline
  • The problem
  • Standard responses
  • Increasing complexity I
    • Epistemic peerhood and expertise
    • Evidence and reasons: Expertise and competence
  • Increasing complexity II
    • The summative view and the totality view
    • Strategic manoeuvring and different senses of rationality
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.13.04dan
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