Open AccessChallenging the majority rule in matters of truth
Author(s) -
Bernd Lahno
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
erasmus journal for philosophy and economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 9
ISSN - 1876-9098
DOI - 10.23941/ejpe.v7i2.167
Subject(s) - counterexample , argument (complex analysis) , simple (philosophy) , epistemology , order (exchange) , computer science , psychology , cognitive psychology , mathematics , philosophy , economics , biochemistry , chemistry , discrete mathematics , finance
The majority rule has caught much attention in recent debate about the aggregation of judgments. But its role in finding the truth is limited. A majority of expert judgments is not necessarily authoritative, even if all experts are equally competent, if they make their judgments independently of each other, and if all the judgments are based on the same source of (good) evidence. In this paper I demonstrate this limitation by presenting a simple counterexample and a related general result. I pave the way for this argument by introducing a Bayesian model of evidence and expert judgment in order to give a precise account of the basic problem.