Consensus
"Consensus has two common meanings. One is a general agreement among the members of a given group or community. The other is as a theory and practice of getting such agreements." (Wikipedia, 2005).

"Interestingly the peer-review process in most scientific journals does not use a consensus based process. Referees submit their opinions individually and there is not a strong effort to reach a group opinion." (Wikipedia, 2005).

Meta-analysis and the Delphi method are among the methodologies used in consensus panels (cf. Wortman, 2001).

Umarani (1992, pp. 218-219) writes:
"Henri Bliss really made a very important contribution in conceiving the scientific and educational consensus. But he erred in presuming the consensus to be more or less permanent and representing the inherent eternal and everlasting order of nature. But perhaps, Bliss' views were in agreement with the late nineteenth or early twentieth century belief of the intellectuals that most of the sciences had been discovered. About 1905 and 1906 the catalogue of the university of Chicago and particularly the section listing the courses in the department of Physics was prefaced with the statement that physicists had discovered everything and that there was nothing to be discovered and all that remained was to refine the techniques of measurement to make discoveries a little more precise. Well, one can see now, how completely innocent these predecessors of Einstein were.
    Today, knowledge is considered as a system, because it not only grows but changes and becomes more complex while growing. In addition, changes is not just a question of individual items of knowledge, it implies or involves also changes in relationships between individual items. Such changes in relationships affect not only comparative small areas of knowledge but also whole fields of human study and endeavor. .... This idea runs contrary to the notion propounded by H. E. Bliss, that the changes in the relationships between areas of knowledge were unlikely. Curiously enough Bliss' error in this is perhaps itself an example of the fact that knowledge changes.."

"if you had been information specialist some two or three hundred years ago, you might have surveyed all the known experiments to determine the melting point of lead, and have drawn up a table like Table A in Figure 1, in which there was considerable variation, one experiment to another. From such a table, a scientist (or indeed anyone with common sense!) would conclude that the melting point of lead is somewhere between 320° C and 331° C. But this is in no way accurate enough for science. Why did experimenters (or the same experimenter on a subsequent occasion) obtain different readings? Obviously, due to an inaccuracy of the thermometer, or an uncontrolled variable having a disproportionate effect upon the experiment. In science, a few years later, the information specialist (if such had existed in those days) would have come up, after a survey worldwide of all chemists/physicists trying to establish the melting point of lead, with a table like Table B in Figure 1. Here there is less variation. By this time, however, it would have been reasonable to conclude that scientists can be 99.9% sure that the melting point of lead is 327.5° C, and that in a few years, the accuracy can be extended to a further decimal point.

"There are many reason why a community might decide to cling to a bad theory—stubbornness , fear, social prejudice against those who advance alternatives. But if one theory leads its believers into more serious errors than another possible competitor, that theory is epistemically inferior to its competitor even if the community remains in denial about these errors. " (Rockwell, 2003).
 

Literature:

Brittain, M. (2000). Beyond information retrieval: towards consensus. Proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Medical Librarianship. Accessed 06-04-2006 at: http://web.archive.org/web/20010520040353/http://www.icml.org/tuesday/future/brittain.htm

Rockwell, T. (2003). Rorty, Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and Metaphysics. Education and Culture: the Journal of the John Dewey Society. http://users.california.com/~mcmf/rorty.html

Umarani, A. (1992). Knowledge Classification - A Permanent Structure for Dynamic Knowledge. Pp. 211-222. IN: Neelameghan, A. et al.: Cognitive Paradigms in Knowledge Organization. Second International ISKO Conference Madras 26-28 August 1992. Bangalore: Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, University of Madras.
 

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2005). Consensus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus

Wortman, P. M. (2001). Consensus panels, methodology. IN: Smelser, N. J. & Baltes, P. B. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford. (Pp. 2609-2613).

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 06-04-2006

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