Haixin Dang (University of Pittsburgh)
I argue in this paper that collaborators do not, in fact, need to reach board agreement over the justification of a consensus claim. This is because maintaining a diversity of justifiers within a scientific collaboration has important epistemic value. Existing views of collective justification overemphasize consensus and agreement among collaborators. I develop a view of collective justification which depends on the diversity of epistemic perspectives present in a scientific group. I argue that a group can be collectively justified in asserting that P as long as the disagreement among collaborators over the reasons is itself justified. I outline two epistemic "mechanisms" which are sources of diversity of justifiers in a scientific collaboration. Both of these mechanisms lead to a diversity of reasons among collaborators which should be maintained and not minimized. This diversity itself then is of epistemic value to the collaboration. In conclusion, I make a case for multi-method collaborative research and work through an example in the social sciences.
