Truth And Consensus

Can we determine the truth by consensus? I don’t think so. Truth by consensus is the ambitious process of arbitrating the truth by general agreement. However, this process lacks reliability because general agreement upon something does not render it actually true. The majority opinion of a popular vote in a poll, for instance, does not really confirm its verity. This is so because people are frequently Ill-informed. Furthermore, people are prone to wishful thinking; they are gullible and easily misled, and consequently they can believe that a fallacious assertion is correct, in spite of the existing evidence and facts to the contrary. A case in point concerns the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. In 1772 Lavoisier had signed a memorandum, with other scientists of the Paris Academy of Sciences, stating that “meteorites don’t exist, because the falling of stones from the sky is physically impossible.” But, mind you, defying scientific authority, one evening, more exactly at 9: 30 p.m. on July 24,1790, the meteorite Barbotan fell in le Gers in the southwest of France and the fall was witnessed by the mayor and the city council. Nevertheless, the scientist Claude Louis Berthollet, a developer of the theory of chemical equilibriums, reacted to the event with these words: “How sad it is that the entire town enters folk tales upon an official record, presenting them as something actually seen, while they cannot be explained by physics nor by anything reasonable.” Lavoisier was still alive at the time that the meteorite hit le Gers. Tragically, the discoverer of oxygen and nitrogen in air, the destroyer of the phlogiston theory, was guillotined four years later during the French Revolution. He was executed for his involvement with a tax collecting company. As to the quest for substantiating the truth by public accord, it had famously been carried over, for example, to the twentieth century in connection with the rise of modern physics. In 1931 contrarians to the Theory of Relativity published a book in Leipzig, Germany, titled Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (“A Hundred Authors against Einstein”) . “But why 100 authors? ” Einstein asked. “If I were wrong, then one would be enough.”