Experts and Consensus in Economics and the Social Sciences

The term ‘expert-based consensus’ refers to the practice of relying on the experience and subjective judgment of experts, rather than on other types of evidence (for example from computer models or statistics) when seeking consensus in science. Seeking expert-based consensus becomes a particularly pressing problem when policy applications are needed and yet the current formal models or analytical methods are insufficient for drawing policy conclusions from the science itself. The goal of this workshop is to bring together philosophers and social scientists who have done extensive work on the problems of expertise and expert-based consensus, in order to discuss both theoretical and applied issues related to a methodology of expert judgment and consensus seeking among experts. While the focus of this workshop is primarily on those aspects of the topic that are related to the social sciences, the workshop will touch on the natural sciences and engineering as well. That will allow, additionally, for a useful comparison between disciplines, and it will offer an opportunity for drawing possible distinctions between the use of expert-based consensus in the social as compared to other sciences.