Carlo Martini

One is the beloved author of The Name of the Rose, a celebrated scholar, philosopher, and self-declared secularist; the other is a preeminent clergyman and a respected expert on the New Testament. In this intellectually stimulating dialogue, often adversarial but always amicable, these two great men, who stand on opposite sides of the church door, discuss some of the most controversial issues of our day, including the apocalypse, abortion, women in the clergy, and ethics. As we voyage onward into the new millennium, they frame a debate about matters that have already begun to rage, always aware of the gulf between belief and nonbelief that separates them, constantly probing and challenging, but also respectful of the other’s viewpoint. For believers and nonbelievers alike, the result is both edifying and illuminating. “Their correspondence,” writes Professor Harvey Cox in his introduction, “lifts the possibility of intelligent conversation on religion to a new level.”

In this paper I criticize the current standards for the acceptability of expert testimony in current US legislation. The standards have been the subject of much academic literature after the Frye and Daubert cases. I expose what I call the Paradox of Proof, and argue that the historical and current standards have sidestepped the problem of determining who is an expert and who is not in a court of law. I then investigate the problem of recognizing expertise from the layperson’s standpoint, and suggest what courses of action the future research ought to take on the problem of identifying expertise.

The concept of evidence has gone unanalysed in much of the current debate between proponents and critics of evidence-based medicine. In this paper I will suggest that part of the controversy rests on an understanding of the word “evidence” that is too broad, and therefore contains the contradictions that allow both camps to defend their position and charge their adversaries. I will argue that reconciling the different meanings of the word ‘evidence’ in “evidence-based medicine” should help put EBM in its rightful place.

Science progresses through debate and disagreement, and scientific controversies play a crucial role in the growth of scientific knowledge. However, not all controversies and disagreements are progressive in science. Sometimes, controversies can be pseudoscientific; in fact, bogus controversies, and what seem like genuine scientific disagreements, can be a distortion of science set up by non-scientific actors. Bogus controversies are detrimental to science because they can hinder scientific progress and eventually bias science-based decisions. The first goal of this paper is to elucidate the distinction between bogus and genuine scientific controversies and provide a qualitative methodology, based on the literature on expertise, for distinguishing between the two. We will illustrate six epistemic criteria for distinguishing bogus from genuine scientific debates in science and medicine. This heuristic strategy applies directly to scientific reports, and it relies mostly on the social structure of science. We will then apply the above criteria to a case study: the controversy over statins, which are widely prescribed drugs for reducing the level of cholesterol and preventing cardiovascular disease.

Knowledge brokers are among the main channels of communication between scientists and the public and a key element to establishing a relation of trust between the two. But translating knowledge from the scientific community to a wider audience presents several difficulties, which can be accentuated in times of crisis. In this paper we study some of the problems that knowledge brokers face when communicating in times of crisis. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected interviews with Italian experts that played a major role as knowledge brokers in the local media. We asked them questions about five main topics: the features and role of science communicators; the use of language in communicating science; the importance of the relation of trust with the public; the peculiarity of communicating in a context of emergency; the problem of disagreement among experts, and its public perception and communication. The goal of this paper is to understand, through the words of knowledge brokers themselves, what they consider as best practices (and obstacles) to create trust between scientists and the public. Our empirical work can inform normative accounts of what knowledge brokering should be about.

In this paper, I contend that evidence-focused strategies of science communication may be complemented by possibly more effective rhetorical arguments in current public debates on vaccines. I analyse the case of direct science communication - that is, communication of evidence - and show that it is difficult to effectively communicate evidential standards of science in the presence of well-equipped anti-science movements. Instead, I argue that effective rhetorical tools involve ad hominem strategies, that is, arguments involving claims of expertise. I provide a rationale, and sketch a methodology, for using ad hominem arguments in science communication.

[1st paragraph] A philosophical discussion on evidence-based medicine (EBM) can be probably perceived almost as an oxymoron. How can “the process of systematically finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decisions” (Jenicek 2012: 23) be compatible with the critical and systematic examination of fundamental problems such as the nature of being, reality, thinking, values and perception? How can a scientific field focused mainly on the search and evaluation of evidence and aimed at solid quantifications of hypotheses (Jenicek 2003: 70) be approachable from a perspective that is characterized by probable or defeasible arguments? The challenge of this special issue is to show how a philosophical perspective on evidence is not opposed to, but rather at the grounds of evidence-based medicine.

This book brings together the research of philosophers and social scientists. It examines those areas of scientific practice where reliance on the subjective judgment of experts and practitioners is the main source of useful knowledge to address, and, possibly, bring solutions to social problems. A common phenomenon in applications of science is that objective evidence does not point to a single answer, or solution, to a problem. Reliance on subjective judgment, then, becomes necessary, despite the known fact that hunches, even those of putative experts, often provide information that is not very accurate, and that experts are prone to fallacies and biases. The book looks at how experts reach consensus in the social sciences, and which experts are relevant to which problems. This book offers the ingredients for building a normative theory of expertise on the basis of the evidence that social scientists and philosophers have uncovered.

This paper focuses on the question of how to resolve disagreement and uses the Lehrer-Wagner model as a formal tool for investigating consensual decision-making. The main result consists in a general definition of when agents treat each other as epistemic peers (Kelly 2005; Elga 2007), and a theorem vindicating the “equal weight view” to resolve disagreement among epistemic peers. We apply our findings to an analysis of the impact of social network structures on group deliberation processes, and we demonstrate their stability with the help of numerical simulations.

In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, and argue that consensus models offer us a solution concept for disagreements behind the veil of ignorance.

In this paper I analyze four so-called “principles of expertise”; that is, good epistemic practices that are normatively motivated by the epistemological literature on expert judgment. I highlight some of the problems that the four principles of expertise run into, when we try to implement them in concrete contexts of application (e.g. in science committees). I suggest some possible alternatives and adjustments to the principles, arguing in general that the epistemology of expertise should be informed both by case studies and by the literature on the use of experts in science practice

In recent decades much literature has been produced on disagreement; the puzzling conclusion being that epistemic disagreement is, for the most part, either impossible (e.g. Aumann (Ann Stat 4(6):1236–1239, 1976)), or at least easily resolvable (e.g. Elga (Noûs 41(3):478–502, 2007)). In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, an equally puzzling result arises: that is, disagreement cannot be rationally resolved by belief updating. I suggest a solution to the puzzle which makes use of some of the principles of Hintikka’s Socratic epistemology

Social epistemology is a relatively new and booming field of research. It studies the social dimension of the pursuit of acquiring true beliefs and requires philosophical as well as sociological and economic expertise. The insights gained in social epistemology are not only of theoretical interest; they also improve our understanding of social and political processes, as the field includes the analysis of group deliberation and group decision-making. However, surprisingly little work has so far been done on the epistemic properties of group deliberation, belief aggregation, and decision-making procedures. To close this gap, the construction and analysis of formal models are especially promising as formal modeling combines representational adequacy with instructive analytical results. This special issue collects papers that follow this strategy from the point of view of different disciplines.

Distributed Cognition and the Will is a very ambitious collection of 13 essays exploring different facets of the relation between an “old problem” and a relatively recent field of studies . As Don Ross, one of the editors, points out in the very opening lines of the introduction, if there were a ranking of the major problems that have been discussed in roughly two and a half millennia of philosophical enquiry, the problem of the will would figure among the top hits. But recent studies and empirical work on cognition and behavioral sciences come to conclusions in stark contrast with the traditional notions of agency, free will and will-causes-action accounts. One of the authors’ opening claims illustrates the general spirit of the collection: P. S. Davies writes that “the traditional notions of agency are dead or dying and their replacements are yet to be born or yet to reach maturity” . These 13 essays are an interdisciplinary attempt to contribute to a better understanding of the flaws embedded in the classical conceptions of will and agency and to put forward some proposals for new or revised ones