The Temporal Structure of Scientific Consensus Formation

TLDR

Scientific debates are opaque, raising questions about how trajectories unfold, when a proposition becomes fact, and how we can know. The authors develop a strategy to evaluate the state of scientific contestation on issues. They apply Latour’s black‑box imagery to citation networks, analyzing cases such as smoking, coffee, cellular phones, and vaccines‑autism to evaluate scientific contestation. They find that as consensus forms, internal divisions become less influential in the network, and that analyzing internal structure yields a typology of trajectories toward consensus.

Abstract

This article engages with problems that are usually opaque: What trajectories do scientific debates assume, when does a scientific community consider a proposition to be a fact, and how can we know that? We develop a strategy for evaluating the state of scientific contestation on issues. The analysis builds from Latour’s black box imagery, which we observe in scientific citation networks. We show that as consensus forms, the importance of internal divisions to the overall network structure declines. We consider substantive cases that are now considered facts, such as the carcinogenicity of smoking and the non-carcinogenicity of coffee. We then employ the same analysis to currently contested cases: the suspected carcinogenicity of cellular phones, and the relationship between vaccines and autism. Extracting meaning from the internal structure of scientific knowledge carves a niche for renewed sociological commentary on science, revealing a typology of trajectories that scientific propositions may experience en route to consensus.