On 9/17/06, Kim van der Linde kim@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.