In
philosophy, truth by consensus is the process of taking statements to be true because people generally agree upon them.
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos (, ; hu, Lakatos Imre ; 9 November 1922 – 2 February 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pr ...
characterizes it as a "watered down" form of provable
truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...
propounded by some
sociologists of knowledge, particularly
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book '' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term ''paradig ...
and
Michael Polanyi
Michael Polanyi (; hu, Polányi Mihály; 11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism supplies ...
.
Philosopher
Nigel Warburton
Nigel Warburton (; born 1962) is a British philosopher. He is best known as a populariser of philosophy, having written a number of books in the genre, but he has also written academic works in aesthetics and applied ethics.
Education
Warburton r ...
argues that the truth by consensus process is not a reliable way of discovering truth, that there is general agreement upon something does not make it actually true.
There are two main reasons for this:
# One reason Warburton discusses is that people are prone to wishful thinking. People can believe an assertion and espouse it as truth in the face of overwhelming evidence and facts to the contrary, simply because they wish that things were so.
# The other one is that people are gullible, and easily misled.
See also
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Common knowledge
Common knowledge is knowledge that is publicly known by everyone or nearly everyone, usually with reference to the community in which the knowledge is referenced. Common knowledge can be about a broad range of subjects, such as science, literat ...
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Consensus reality
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Conventional wisdom
The conventional wisdom or received opinion is the body of ideas or explanations generally accepted by the public and/or by experts in a field. In religion, this is known as orthodoxy.
Etymology
The term is often credited to the economist John ...
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Cultural impact of ''The Colbert Report'' § Wikipedia references
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Jury trial
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Truthiness
Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from i ...
References
Consensus
Consensus reality
Concepts in epistemology
Informal fallacies
Philosophy of science
Truth
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