[WikiEN-l] Expert editors

[George Herbert]

On 9/17/06, Kim van der Linde <kim at kimvdlinde.com> wrote:
> Maybe that your field of expertise works by consensus, mine does not
> (and honestly, students who think that science works by consensus need
> to retake philosophy-of-science 101).

All fields work by consensus.  Grant committees, journal editors and
reviewers, PhD committees, all of these act via consensus.

The individual findings of research are at one level not subject to
consensus (the experiment either shows X or does not show X), and at
another are (others in the field agree that the experiment was good,
valid, properly designed, and does show X).

It's not just a matter of doing an experiment and gathering data.
It's also a matter of convincing others that your results are correct.
 Individual facts are not "known" to a field until multiple
researchers believe that the result is credible.  There have been
plenty of fringe results which were ultimately unrepeatable, and have
not been adopted as consensus truth by a scientific field.

Certain subjects are less prone to this, in that the discovery process
is pretty self-documenting for those practicing in them, math in
particular.  But even some proofs are disputed over time...

While not formally part of the "scientific method", these are
important parts of the scientific process.  The process assumes
fallability of individual researchers and results, and demands a
higher standard.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com