Vasiliki Xiromeriti
Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University
It is widely accepted that scientific knowledge is a social achievement. Scientific inquiry builds on collaborative interactions among experts who divide the labor. Mutual criticism and argumentation, institutionalized in the form of academic journals and scientific events, are also believed to bear epistemic benefits to the scientific community, since they enable scientists to identify possible errors and omissions. Moreover, given the complexity of today’s epistemic issues (e.g. climate change), much research is based on interdisciplinary collaborations, uniting scientists from across the globe.
Although it is clear that science is a collaborative activity, the way in which individuals come to share and integrate knowledge is not sufficiently understood. Most studies in epistemology treat of the way experts share information and focus on the relationship between testimony and trust. Argumentation in scientific groups is supposed to rely on genuinely epistemic reasons – namely evidence and judgments about each other’s expertise – and if appropriately conducted, it should lead to consensus and truth. Although such interactions may be common in scientific groups, this picture fails to account for cases of non-factual disagreement among experts. Non-factual disagreement, holding mainly on foundational and methodological differences among experts, is most likely to surface in interdisciplinary groups, often uniting scientists from different countries, educational background and areas of expertise.
The aim of this paper is to address disagreement in scientific groups and draw attention to the role of deliberation in justifying collaborative results in science. Philosophers have traditionally restricted the domain of deliberation to questions about action. I claim that deliberation – that is, confrontation and comparison of reasons for and against alternative judgments – is quite common in scientific contexts. Scientists often need to engage in deliberative reasoning when it comes to handling disagreement. In order to support this claim, I will start by explaining epistemic deliberation as shared reasoning, after Bratman’s account of shared agency. By defining scientific collaborations as shared intentional activities, it is possible to understand scientific deliberation as reasoning on the part of the group, aimed at accomplishing its epistemic goals. Based on that and relying on a dialectical analysis of shared reasoning, I will be able to distinguish and discuss the conditions for successful collaboration and what it means for an epistemic group to be justified through deliberation. This analysis of scientific deliberation will be illustrated by examples taken from deliberative practices within the IPCC working groups.
Chair: Johannes Nyström
Time: September 8th, 14:40-15:10
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 