Abstract
The generation and dissemination of scientific knowledge are closely related to group beliefs among scientists and the public. There are three main types of group beliefs: the summative account, the acceptance account and the commitment account. Applying these theories to the realm of science, which is characterized by its rigorous organizational structures and epistemological standards, reveals the distinctive features of how group beliefs are formed within this domain. This paper argues that an updated version of the commitment account is more applicable in the scientific domain, in which scientists jointly commit to joining this group and also jointly commit to its operational mechanisms and methodologies. The requirement of the commitment account on the group belief of the public also places greater emphasis on the recognition of and joint commitment to the scientific spirit, rather than the mastery of specific propositions by each individual.
Introduction
Scientific knowledge is not a flash of inspiration from great scientists; it is the result of the collective efforts of the scientific community and the foundation for subsequent research. It also has the need and mission to be disseminated to the public, so that more people can benefit from its outcomes and give their support to it. In this sense, the generation and dissemination of scientific knowledge are closely related to group beliefs.
Belief is a propositional attitude, and knowledge expressed in the form of language is a typical belief. For instance, seeing dark clouds in the sky, one may form the belief that ‘heavy rain is imminent’. This is a personal belief that one holds. However, we also encounter another form of belief in life, which is group belief, meaning a specific belief held by a particular group. The group could be members of the same study group, a sports team, a university or a company. Unlike individuals, a university or a company does not have a centralized brain, so it may seem odd to say that it holds a belief. Yet, we often hear in daily life or in the news statements like: Chinese people believe that ‘the Five-starred Red Flag is the national flag of China’; our whole family thinks that ‘having Italian pasta on Friday noon is a great choice’; or Google believes that ‘protecting technological innovation is a must’. In other words, we attribute a belief to a collective entity. Therefore, the notion of group belief is widely accepted by us.
So, what is the state of a group belief? Does it require everyone in the group to hold that belief? When a respected university president makes a statement on behalf of the school, can the content of the statement be considered the group belief of the university? In recent years, there have been quite a few studies and even theoretical debates on these questions in the field of social epistemology.
This paper commences with an exploration of several foundational theories of group belief. Utilizing these theories, my analysis extends to encompass both the scientific community and the general public. The aim is to offer a collective epistemological interpretation of the dynamics involved in reaching a consensus within the scientific community and the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the wider public.
The scientific community is a special type of group with clear collective goals and a well-organized structure. The most important feature of this community is that the core of its group belief is scientific knowledge. When we hope to popularize scientific knowledge to the public, it seems we also wish to extend the group belief of the scientific community to the public. This paper argues that an updated version of the commitment theory is more suitable for dealing with group belief issues in the scientific domain, both for the scientific community and for the target of communication—the public.
Analysing through the prism of group belief sheds light on various issues, including the genesis of scientific knowledge, the boundary between experts and the public, and the nuances of disseminating scientific concepts to the masses. The distinctive realm of science reciprocally bolsters the theoretical framework of collective epistemology. Regarding divergences among different philosophical theories, this paper grounds its assessments in concrete examples drawn from the annals of scientific history. The extensive interpretive scope and the conditions under which those historical instances apply will, conversely, pose challenges to prevailing epistemological doctrines.
Three representative theories of group belief
In human life, there exists a vast array of group types, from small groups consisting of just two people (such as a couple forming a small family) to global groups (such as the working class), and from highly structured groups (such as Google) to ad hoc, loosely organized groups (such as three people who come together on the street to play basketball). The attributes of group belief may vary sharply among different groups. For example, a couple might form a group belief that ‘those without professional occupations should take on more household chores’ because both of them hold the same belief. On the other hand, Google clearly states on its official website that the company's mission is ‘to pool the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. That said, the company's CFO might believe that the company's mission is to make a profit, while many ordinary employees might think that the company's mission is to provide a stable source of salaries for its employees. If that is the case, does the company mission stated on Google's official website represent the group belief of Google? Normally, we would consider that to be its group belief, although the example of Google clearly contradicts that of the couple. Different philosophers have responded to these phenomena with different theories.
Within current research, three typical theories have been developed to elucidate the concept of group beliefs (Tollefsen, 2015): the summative account, the acceptance account and the commitment account.
Summative account
Most of the time, beliefs are distributed among the members of a group. For instance, people from Sichuan believe that ‘food is tasteless without spice’. This belief is attributed to the group of people from Sichuan because most of them hold this view. In such cases, the group belief is the sum of the beliefs held by all or most individuals within the group. We use this naive notion to conduct a one-person-one-vote democratic process, in which the opinion of the majority within the group is seen as representing the opinion of the whole group.
According to the summative view of group belief ascriptions, when we attribute a belief to a group, we are really just saying that all or most of the group members believe it. The truth of those ascriptions, then, rests on whether or not all or most of the members believe whatever we have attributed to the group. We might formalize the summative account in the following way, where ‘p’ stands for a proposition: Group G believes that p if and only if all or most of the members of G believe that p.
This view can be challenged by many counterexamples. First, if the individuals within a group privately believe p without knowing that others also believe p, even if everyone in the group believes p, we might still not think that p is the belief of this group. For example, if all the students in a dormitory think that the most popular movie of the moment is not good, but each of them believes they are the odd one out and assumes that others in the dorm have different opinions, then even if every dorm member holds that belief, we still cannot consider it a group belief. Therefore, we would often add the condition of common knowledge to the summative account, meaning that we also know that others hold belief p.
More importantly, in other cases, the ascription is non-distributed. This type of belief is attributed to the whole group. Beliefs attributed to committees, boards, companies and teams often fall into this category. When a group has a well-defined organizational structure, clear decision-making procedures and a designated spokesperson or leader, its group belief does not always represent the belief of the majority of members. Here is a possible scenario: a 10-person judging panel has chosen a candidate for a job in the company, but that candidate might not be the first pick of most panel members. They have picked him only because two members have a strong preference, while the other eight have no clear position or they prefer other candidates but are unwilling to voice their dissent. Consequently, the belief of two individuals becomes the group belief. Group beliefs formed in this way cannot be explained by the summative account.
Additionally, if a belief has no impact on the collective life of a group and does not play any part in the group's work plan or discussion or affect the group's behaviours, it will not be considered a group belief. For instance, if the faculty of a philosophy department all believe that ‘pandas are the cutest animals’, this shared belief, not being part of any departmental agenda, would not be considered their group belief. The motive and significance of our discussion on group beliefs lies in the possible influence of such beliefs on the group's behaviours.
Acceptance account
There are many forms of acceptance account, and Tuomela's (1995) theory is the most typical. According to Tuomela, a group believes something if and only if there are members within the organization who have a special position and decision-making role, and other members accept together (or jointly accept) that proposition as the view of the group. These folks know that there is such acceptance in place by all others, and the non-operative members—the poor guys on the assembly line, for instance—tacitly accept that this proposition is the view of the group. Here is the more technical analysis Tuomela provides in ‘group beliefs’: (Belief of Group) G believes that p in the social and normative circumstances C if and only if in C there are operative members A1 … Am in G with respective positions P … Pm such that (1)the agents A … Am when they are performing their social tasks in their positions P … Pm, and due to their exercising, the relevant authority system in G, (intentionally) jointly accept p as the view of G, and because of this exercise of the authority system they ought to continue to accept or positionally believe that p; (2)there is a mutual belief among the operative members to the effect that (1); (3)because of (1) the full-fledged and adequately informed non-operative members of G tend to tacitly accept—or at least ought to accept—p as members of G; (4)there is a mutual belief in G to the effect that (3). (Tuomela, 1995: 295)
The acceptance account explains the most common situations of group beliefs in modern society, where, in tightly organized groups such as companies and governments, group beliefs are primarily determined by the decision-makers. It envisions a structured group state in which individuals within the group do not all hold equal positions. Leaders and decision-makers of companies or governments play a very different role in forming group beliefs compared to ordinary staff members. Often, the formation of group beliefs seems to be related only to the leadership and decision-makers, while others simply accept their views as the group's opinion. Leaders and decision-makers are also aware of their role and do not need to enquire about the opinions of others each time.
This theory can address the biggest dilemma: group beliefs often do not represent the opinions of the majority of group members. In extreme scenarios, it is possible that no single member of a group might hold a particular belief, yet that belief can still emerge as the group belief. This challenges the widespread assumption that group beliefs are inherently grounded in individual beliefs. Furthermore, the acceptance account also creates the possibility that an individual's personal convictions can be distinct from those associated with their role, potentially leading to a conflict between the two sets of beliefs. For example, as an individual, I might think that society does not need so many philosophy graduates, but, as the head of a philosophy department, I would believe it is necessary to maintain a certain scale of admissions. Perhaps every teacher in the philosophy department shares my thought, thus creating an extreme situation in which no individual belief matches the group belief.
Commitment account
Both the summative account and the acceptance account, whether they think it is the majority or the minority that determines the group belief, believe that group beliefs originate from role-based individual/personal beliefs. In other words, group beliefs can be traced back to individual beliefs, although the two theories have very different views on how that is achieved. They do not believe that there first needs to be a group capable of holding beliefs before group beliefs are formed. The commitment account, however, argues that a group of people needs a magical factor to unite them as ‘we’ (a plural subject), thus generating group beliefs that cannot be traced back to individual beliefs. The typical representative of this theory is Margaret Gilbert, and the magical factor is joint commitment.
According to Gilbert (2013), who calls this a joint commitment, paradigmatic social groups are constituted by one or more joint commitments. When they are so constituted, they become ‘plural subjects’, to which actions and intentional states may be ascribed.
It can be seen that the groups Gilbert envisioned when constructing the theory are relatively small because the requirements for joint commitment are actually very high. It requires group members to explicitly express their intentions and know each other's intentions, thus forming plural subjects together. Such requirements can provide a good explanation for normative issues. For example, they can explain that, when an individual in a group does something that does not conform to the group belief, the behaviour itself is condemnable because it violates everyone's joint commitment. Joint commitment allows individuals to hold different opinions, but, once they enter into a joint commitment and form a group belief, they cannot contradict that group belief at will when speaking or acting as a group member, although they can still express different opinions as individuals.
However, in large companies, it is hard to imagine that employees from different departments can understand the thoughts of their colleagues in other departments. To address such challenges, Gilbert believes that we have in fact made a further joint commitment; that is, we are not committing to specific people or beliefs but to the mechanism by which beliefs are generated within the group. If a number of people join an organization, that means they jointly commit to trust the corresponding mechanism of that organization.
From the above discussion, it is evident that, while these theories present distinct viewpoints, they are not inherently in competition with one another. Instead, each theory addresses a different group type and a specific process through which group belief is formed. The summative account deals with relatively loose groups whose beliefs are mainly distributed; the acceptance account deals with groups with stable structures whose beliefs are non-distributed and can explain the group beliefs of institutional organizations in society; the commitment account deals with closer but smaller groups, in which members have a high degree of consensus and mutual responsibility. In the realm of real social life, we can see that these three theories may coexist. It is only through their complementary application that they can adequately elucidate the intricacies of a complex group belief.
Group beliefs of the scientific community
The scientific community is a unique group, and, when we apply theories of group beliefs to it, a number of new questions arise. Foremost among them is the relationship between the group beliefs of the scientific community and scientific knowledge. Is scientific knowledge a group belief? Traditional philosophy of science and our everyday notions do not consider scientific knowledge to be merely a belief, and, even from the perspective of knowledge, scientific knowledge is different from other types of knowledge. Thanks to more accurate scientific instruments and superior scientific methods, scientific knowledge transcends other types of knowledge, gaining a transcendent existence independent of the cognitive subject. Elements such as the preferences and cultural background of the cognitive subject are all deemed negative factors, ideally to be excluded from the realm of scientific knowledge. As a result, the ultimate conception of scientific knowledge becomes a form of knowledge free from subjective elements.
However, a series of deconstructive studies from the 1970s and 1980s, particularly within the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge (Bloor, 1991; Collins, 1992; Latour and Woolgar, 1986), shattered the illusion held by science philosophers that scientific methodology was inherently superior, and vividly illustrated how the values of scientific subjects permeate the research process and ultimately influence the final body of scientific knowledge. They also used sociological and anthropological cases to build their argument. After this wave of enthusiasm subsided, although many of their radical ideas were not accepted, the academic community generally agreed that scientists, as cognitive subjects, should be included in epistemological considerations just like other cognitive subjects. Scientific knowledge is primarily a product of humans in a specific historical and cultural context, rather than inherently superior to other knowledge and possessing an objectivity independently of the cognitive subject. Against such a backdrop, it is nothing strange to recognize scientific knowledge as the consensus or group belief of the current scientific community. However, accepting this does not mean denying the resounding achievements of science in explaining and transforming the world, or refusing to acknowledge it as an effective and successful cognitive practice. Many science philosophers have made attempts to reconcile the success of science with the chaos that is evident in the generation of scientific knowledge. On the basis of acknowledging scientific knowledge as a group belief, they continue to defend the new ‘objectivity’ of science, explain the success of science, or explore whether scientists have any agreed-upon rational norms. For example, Longino (1990) argues that it is inevitable and justifiable for scientists to bring their own subjective preferences into scientific research. As long as a sufficiently diverse range of subjects are allowed into science, each forming their own scientific explanations from their own perspectives, a three-dimensional, multi-angle scientific knowledge is constituted. An individual's discovery must undergo a collective review process, such as anonymous peer review, to be recognized and accepted as valid knowledge by the scientific community; otherwise, it remains a personal belief. In this process, diverse subjective factors are interwoven, together forming the objectivity of science (Longino, 1990). In other words, groups are used to counter subjectivity and thereby produce better knowledge.
In fact, the cognitive subjects understood in methodologically supreme schools of science philosophy such as logical positivism and falsificationism are individuals: abstract and undifferentiated individuals. In these theories, as long as the individuals can reject the influence of their own subjective factors and follow science in their actions, they will be able to obtain scientific knowledge. The connection between these individuals and their group and culture is not important and is irrelevant to scientific knowledge. It is only when we see the cognitive subject of scientific knowledge as a group rather than as an individual that we could have a different understanding of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ and generate different normative interpretations.
Some science philosophers have begun to pay attention to the achievements of group epistemology and introduce them into the analysis of science (see Bird, 2010, 2022; Wray, 2007). In this paper, I develop my argument mainly based on their theories. By analysing how the scientific community constitutes a group and forms group beliefs, this paper provides a new understanding of how science operates. From the perspective of group epistemology, some old questions are given more convincing answers. For example, I propose that, traditionally, people refuse to understand scientific knowledge through the lens of group beliefs, because we have used the acceptance account to understand group beliefs. If the commitment account is used, we will surely be able to see the reasonable normative constraints within.
Bird (2010) regards scientific knowledge as the social knowing of the scientific community. His focus is also on what conditions make individual beliefs become the group's social knowing. He has also examined the feasibility of several classic narratives on group beliefs in the field of science.
First, the summative account. It is socially known that p by a group G if all the members or most members of G know that p. The scientific community knows the second law of thermodynamics if and only if the vast majority of scientists are aware of the second law of thermodynamics. This theory shares much in common with the counterarguments mentioned in the previous section regarding the summative account. For instance, regarding content relevance, scientists at Bell Labs all know that the 2024 Olympics were held in Paris, yet this knowledge has nothing to do with science. We will not reach a conclusion that Bell Labs socially knows that the 2024 Olympics were held in Paris.
The requirement for common knowledge is the same: if, due to the strict division of labour within a large scientific project, such as the Manhattan Project, each scientist knows only about their part of the job and has no knowledge of the entire project, meaning that the vast majority of the scientists in the team do not know ‘how to build an atomic bomb’, we will still consider the entire project team as a collective subject that knows ‘how to build an atomic bomb’. In such counterexamples, we could see that scientific group beliefs typically include a form of socially organized access to that knowledge. Scientific practice does not require everyone to know the knowledge, but the individuals involved can obtain it through certain types of structure or process. For example, in the Manhattan Project, those with specific authorization could gain comprehensive knowledge based on the project's organizational structure. Or, as the project's confidentiality levels gradually decrease, more scientists can access the corresponding knowledge from archives or libraries. This accessibility is a necessary condition for socially knowing.
Second, the commitment account. Wray (2007) argues that the commitment account is in fact a type of acceptance account, suggesting that both perspectives involve members’ willingness to jointly accept/trust a certain belief as the group's belief. This paper does not concur with equating the two and further clarifies this point later. The commitment account can be formally expressed as: It is socially known that p by a group G if all or most members of G express willingness to accept that p jointly with other members of the group under conditions of common knowledge.
This view explains an important attribute of scientific knowledge: that the scientific community's socially knowing this knowledge does not supervene on the knowledge in any scientist's mind. Bird (2022) weaved a typical case based on Mendel's story. After one scientist derived a scientific law through experiments, his/her discovery may be published but not given attention at the time, meaning almost no one read his/her paper or learned of his/her findings. In the years after his/her death, it can be inferred that no one alive knew of his/her research results, meaning that this knowledge did not exist in anyone's mind at the time. However, that does not prevent the scientific community from still knowing that knowledge over the years, because the process of public publication facilitates the transformation from individual belief to collective knowledge. Once transformed, that collective knowledge is no longer attached to the mental state within the individual's head. Instead, through a certain means of social organization, it becomes accessible to everyone.
However, counterexamples to the commitment account also reveal the ambiguity of the scientific community as a cognitive group. Consider this counterexample. In the seventeenth century, astronomers were willing to accept the heliocentric model as their group belief, while publishers also accepted the heliocentric model as their group belief. The former did so because of scientific evidence, while the latter did so because the model helped them sell more books. Did the publishers socially know this scientific knowledge? We might acknowledge that the heliocentric model is a group belief of publishers, but we would not say that they socially know that scientific knowledge, at least not in the same sense as astronomers know it. Thus, this is a case of the epistemological discussion on ‘what is knowing’ (that is, the relationship between evidence and knowledge), but also on whether we should distinguish between different groups in the scientific field.
The scientific community is a vague concept of a group, in which individuals from various disciplines contribute differently to scientific research, ranging from core members making discoveries to peripheral members assisting in experiments, and even members from other disciplines who might not understand the discovery at all. The views among different members of these communities may even contradict each other. Extending this further, we must also take into account the public, who have learned scientific knowledge through study, including the publishers mentioned in the example above. Is there an essential difference between their knowing and that of scientists from other disciplines? Are they even part of the group?
Scholars represented by Bird (2010; 2022), Wray (2007) and De Ridder (2014) have proposed a criterion to identify contributing scientists: It is socially known that p by a group G if some epistemic interactions among those members together produce the view that p.
This view can be called the interactive account. It draws a clear distinction between contributing scientists and scientists in other disciplines as well as the general public, thus excluding the troublesome publishers mentioned above. However, the problem lies here as well; contributing scientists are not a group with a preconceived plan, nor a unified whole. Scientific discoveries are likely to be made by groups with diverse opinions and inconsistent goals. For example, palaeontologists from different countries track the footprints of ancient creatures and other evidence in their regions, piece together the living conditions of reptiles in that era, and ultimately reach the conclusion that a certain giant creature became extinct due to climate change. Yet, some of these palaeontologists might not believe that the existing evidence supports this view and choose to keep their opinions to themselves. Are they still producing the view? If even the scientists who provide voluminous fossil evidence still cannot be considered to be contributing scientists, or part of the socially knowing group, then such a criterion is apparently too narrowly scoped.
Essentially, the problem with this interpretation is its failure to take into full account the chaos in scientific practice revealed by sociologists. Scholars such as Bird have abandoned the idea that scientific knowledge is derived from certain specific methodologies, but they have created another myth: that the scientific community is clearly collaborating to gain scientific knowledge. On this point, this paper echoes Longino's view that science is likely to be disorderly and competitive during the discovery phase, yet, through collective review mechanisms, these discoveries become recognized as a collective achievement and are subsequently organized in an orderly fashion, leading to greater collaboration in the process.
Furthermore, if only the group that contributes to scientific knowledge is considered as socially knowing the knowledge, how should we view scientists from other disciplines and the public, who learn about science through study? How should we understand their knowing? Obviously, these are also important aspects that need to be explained.
Bringing in the public
In this context, Shan Yafeng has proposed a more inclusive historico-practical account
1
. Specifically, his theory can be formally expressed as follows: It is socially known that p by a group G if: (a)all the members of G accept that p practically; (b)p is either collaboratively justified by (at least) some members of G in some exemplary practices or historically testified in a collaborative way; (c)individual knowledge of p in G is derived from either collaborative justification or historical testimony.
Shan emphasizes two types of justification: one used by contributing scientists who collaboratively justify through scientific practices such as experiments, and the other used by laypeople who historically testify through methods such as classroom teaching. This approach accommodates a broader range of groups, such as the previously mentioned group of publishers. The core of the historico-practical account lies in its aim to identify groups that accept a piece of knowledge based on scientifically reasonable evidence and use it in practice, regardless of whether the group members truly believe the knowledge to be true. In the meantime, it also faces some problems. First, it abandons an advantage of the acceptance account, which is to distinguish between an individual's true beliefs and the beliefs that they can accept as group beliefs. Imagine an information technology scientist with devout religious beliefs; he may use evolutionary theory to discuss issues with colleagues at his university, but, when dealing with personal health matters, he may make decisions based on views that contradict evolutionary theory. Which one—evolutionism or anti-evolutionism—is truly accepted practically by him? Second, many people do not know the evidence related to scientific knowledge when they acquire it; they accept this knowledge simply because they believe the cognitive context is reliable when they accept testimony, such as students who believe that the knowledge taught by teachers during class time is reliable. Especially when the accumulation of scientific knowledge has reached a point where ‘black boxes’ are the norm, even scientists are not able to know based solely on the method of justification.
This paper argues that the problem with these theories is that they all attempt to directly deal with individual beliefs p, whether it is direct belief, acceptance or epistemic interaction, and they even try to distinguish the reasons for knowing p. In the process of trying to incorporate various laypeople into the cognitive subject, there is one epistemological shift that has not received enough attention. It is the point stressed by Edward Craig (1990), Bernard Williams (2002) and Miranda Fricker (2007); that is, the acquisition of more authentic knowledge is based on the identification of, trust in and judgement of the source of knowledge, rather than on the evidence. The most typical example is that, in seventeenth-century British society, it was believed that gentlemen possessed special qualities and were very reliable; every piece of testimony they made was naturally accepted and trusted by others without the need for reasons. They also often served as sources of or witnesses to scientific knowledge at the time.
In this section, I return to the commitment account to elucidate its application within the realm of science and subsequently readdress the aforementioned questions. First, the commitment account is not merely another version of the acceptance account. The fundamental distinction lies in the fact posited by Gilbert (2006): that the commitment account requires individuals to form a plural subject based on joint commitment, which then gives rise to group beliefs, collective actions and so on. In contrast, the acceptance account has no such requirement; individual subjects can directly confront the propositions and choose whether to accept them as group beliefs. That is a crucial difference. The resistance to the idea that ‘scientific knowledge is a group belief’ primarily arises from interpreting group beliefs through the lens of the acceptance account. Viewed from this perspective, group beliefs are merely beliefs that group members are willing to accept as such, without the need of any normative assurance. This, however, is far from our understanding and expectations of scientific knowledge. At the very least, we believe that scientific knowledge should be normatively guaranteed, whereas group beliefs interpreted through the acceptance account merely represent a certain kind of preference. We can collectively accept that the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics was the best opening performance in history, or we can collectively accept that it was the worst. Group beliefs that are based purely on preferences cannot explain the practical success of science.
The interpretation of the commitment account reveals an important aspect of science as a collective cognition. The commitment account to be developed here is not the commitment account in its original sense. Even though Gilbert has made numerous adjustments to extend the commitment account to larger groups, she still emphasizes that each individual in the group must explicitly express their intentions. This requirement has been questioned all along, as it seems too stringent for large groups with diverse means of communication. In small groups, multiple individuals can directly make a joint commitment to a single belief p. However, in larger groups, individuals cannot practically deal with every belief. Taking Starbucks as an example: an ordinary employee in Seattle cannot know or judge the company's market strategy in North China. Thus, what they jointly commit to is joining and forming a plural subject, which includes a second-order commitment to common objectives, the group's operational mechanisms, and so on. When there is this joint commitment to the mechanism, they effectively make a joint commitment to the group beliefs that it produces.
It is the same case for the scientific community. This group is formed based on joint commitment, and what they commit to are the fundamental mechanisms that generate scientific knowledge. Science philosophers are all aware of this consensus. Kuhn's (1962) theory of paradigms essentially indicates that the scientific community has basic mechanisms in place across all aspects of knowledge production. More recently, Strevens (2020) argues in The Knowledge Machine that science does not have as many constraints as paradigms require, but he also agrees that the rules of the scientific game have already been set. The rules he envisions are simpler: scientists must resolve disagreements with accurate and detailed data, and, beyond that, anything goes. Those who commit to following these rules constitute the plural subject. The group beliefs derived from the plural subject naturally have the joint commitment of its members. Processes such as public publication serve as pivotal moments when a viewpoint is officially recognized and declared as a group belief. Under this interpretive framework, individual scientists can still keep their doubts about the group belief, but this does not prevent them from recognizing it as the community's consensus.
The commitment account is also applicable in explaining how the public grasps scientific knowledge and can produce some insightful conclusions. Compared to the scientific community, the public is a more ambiguous group concept. It seems to form a group only in contrast to experts. Such a loose structure prevents it from naturally acting as a group. The commitment account requires individuals to jointly commit to the methodology and values of scientific knowledge production. These factors can also be summarized as the scientific spirit championed in contemporary China. This second-order commitment can easily be confused; the object of joint commitment is the scientific spirit, not the scientist group, although the scientific spirit is best represented by scientists in most situations. The more traditional ‘expert authority’ model is, in fact, a form of commitment account, in which the public jointly commits to a specific group or identity, not a method or spirit. The result is that any testimony given by scientific experts should naturally be accepted as a group belief. With a joint commitment to the scientific spirit, the public indirectly makes a joint commitment to the scientific knowledge produced under this mechanism. Although they are not contributing scientists, they also socially know the knowledge.
The commitment account is not entirely exclusive of other theoretical frameworks. For example, during science-popularization efforts in which we aim to equip every member of the public with fundamental scientific literacy, the attempt to disseminate specific scientific propositions to a wider audience is essentially an approach that views scientific knowledge as a group belief through the lens of a summative account.
Conclusion
From the analysis above, it is clear that, when general group belief theories are applied to the domain of science, they encounter unique challenges inherent to the nature of science itself. A primary challenge is the heightened normative expectations that we have for scientific knowledge. Despite the historical diversity within the scientist community, it is still considered an established group. In this context, theories such as the summative account face inherent explanatory challenges, whereas an updated version of the commitment account proves to be more fitting.
The updated commitment account emphasizes the joint commitment of individuals within a group to form a plural subject. At the core of this commitment is the joint commitment to the group's common objectives, methodologies and mechanisms; in other words, a joint commitment to the objectives of science and the prevailing scientific paradigms or methodologies. For the scientific community, joint commitment at this level establishes the rules of the game, allowing scientists to focus intently on advancing the actual content and, to some extent, to differentiate it from pseudoscience and non-mainstream science. For members of the public, they do not need to, nor can they, understand every piece of scientific knowledge in depth or even superficially. More importantly, they can now also commit to the common objectives, methodologies and mechanisms of science.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Xiao Tan is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the School of Political Science and Law, Capital Normal University. Her main research interests include social epistemology and the philosophy of science and technology.