Collectivizing Public Scientific Testimony

Abstract On many topics of common interest, there are multiple scientific experts who are more-or-less equally reliable as far as most laypeople can tell. In such situations, it would generally be a bad idea for those laypeople to form or update their opinions by deferring to the opinions of individual experts; rather, when possible, they should consider the more general distribution of opinions among all the experts. Building on this thought, this paper argues that scientific experts themselves should ideally not simply report their own opinions on topics within their expertise; rather, if possible, they should provide information about expert opinion distributions more generally, for example, by communicating that a majority of their fellow experts take such-and-such position on a topic while the minority has a contrary view – even when they are themselves in the minority. I go on to trace some important implications of this argument, for example, that scientific communities have an epistemic obligation to periodically gather data on expert opinion distributions regarding topics that are of interest to the general public.