Introduction: Experts and consensus in social science

Abstract

The ideals of science as objectivity and consensus are – unsurprisingly – not so easy to attain in scientific practice. Science is ultimately a product of individual scientists with their own personal backgrounds and experiences, and there is no unique methodology to de-personalize and objectify knowledge. Social scientists, in particular, use a variety of tools for their investigations: They gather evidence from different sources, under different conditions and with different instruments. They are both the locus where different sources of evidence aggregate and also a direct source of evidence that comes in as intuitions and background knowledge. Acknowledging this wide variety of sources of evidence and methods in social science, different kinds of methodologies for reaching consensus have been developed. What kind of consensus is indicative of good science? What are the rules for consensus formation? And, is there a normative aspect to the formation of scientific and policy making consensus? The contributions of this book focus on experts: those institutional figures that act as a liaison between science and policy makers, politicians, governments, and other public domains.