The Devil is in the (historical) details: Continental drift as a case of normatively appropriate consensus?

Abstract

In Social Empiricism, Miriam Solomon proposes a via media between traditional philosophical realism and social construction of scientific knowledge, but ignores a large body of historical literature that has attempted to plough just that path. She also proposes a standard for normatively appropriate consensus that, arguably, no theory in the history of science has ever achieved, including her own ideal type-plate tectonics. And while valorizing dissent, she fails to consider how dissent has been used in recent decades as a political tool to challenge scientific evidence on diverse issues, including the link between tobacco and cancer and the reality of anthropogenic global warming. © 2008 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.