Look up consensus in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Consensus usually refers to general agreement among a group of people or community. It may also refer to:
Consensus usually refers to general agreement among a group of people or community. It may also refer to:
Sanity refers to the soundness, rationality, and health of the human mind, as opposed to insanity. A person is sane if they are rational. In modern society, the term has become exclusively synonymous with compos mentis, in contrast with non compos mentis, or insanity, meaning troubled conscience. A sane mind is nowadays considered healthy both from its analytical - once called rational - and emotional aspects. According to the writer G. K. Chesterton, sanity involves wholeness, whereas insanity implies narrowness and brokenness.
A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be scientific, belong to a non-scientific discipline, or no discipline at all. Depending on the context, a theory's assertions might, for example, include generalized explanations of how nature works. The word has its roots in ancient Greek, but in modern use it has taken on several related meanings.
Consensus reality refers to the generally agreed-upon version of reality within a community or society, shaped by shared experiences and understandings. This understanding arises from the inherent differences in individual perspectives or subjectivities relating to knowledge or ontology, leading to uncertainties about what is real. While various viewpoints exist, people strive to establish a consensus, serving as a pragmatic guide for social norms. The term carries both positive and negative connotations, as it is viewed critically by anti-realist theorists but recognized for its practical benefits in fostering shared beliefs. Consensus reality differs from consensual reality, with the former representing mutual agreement about what is true. Artists and thinkers have challenged consensus reality, aiming to disrupt established norms and question the authenticity of the world's reality.
Arrow's impossibility theorem is a key result in social choice showing that no ranked-choice voting rule can produce logically coherent results with more than two candidates. Specifically, any such rule violates independence of irrelevant alternatives: the principle that a choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated outcome .
Consensus decision-making or consensus process is a group decision-making process in which participants develop and decide on proposals with the goal of achieving broad acceptance, defined by its terms as form of consensus. The focus on establishing agreement of at least the majority or the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision. Consensus decision-making in a democracy is consensus democracy.
The conventional wisdom or received opinion is the body of ideas or explanations generally accepted by the public and/or by experts in a field. In religion, this is known as orthodoxy.
Scientific consensus is the generally held judgment, position, and opinion of the majority or the supermajority of scientists in a particular field of study at any particular time.
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. This evaluation is typically done at the economy-wide level, and attempts to assess the distribution of resources and opportunities among members of society.
Majoritarianism is a political philosophy or ideology with an agenda asserting that a majority, whether based on a religion, language, social class, or other category of the population, is entitled to a certain degree of primacy in society, and has the right to make decisions that affect the society. This traditional view has come under growing criticism, and liberal democracies have increasingly included constraints on what the parliamentary majority can do, in order to protect citizens' fundamental rights. Majoritarianism should not be confused with electoral systems that give seats to candidates with only a plurality of votes. Although such systems are sometimes called majoritarian systems, they use plurality, not majority, to set winners. Some electoral systems, such as instant-runoff voting, are most often majoritarian – winners are most often determined by having majority of the votes that are being counted – but not always. A parliament that gives lawmaking power to any group that holds a majority of seats may be called a majoritarian parliament. Such is the case in the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the Parliament of Saudi Arabia and many other chambers of power.
Majority rule is the principle that a group which has more than half of all voters should be allowed to make the decisions for a group. Majority rule is the binary decision rule most often used in decision-making bodies, including many legislatures of democratic nations. Where no one party wins a majority of the seats in a legislature, the majority of legislators that wields power is partly composed of members of other parties in support.
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969).
Models of scientific inquiry have two functions: first, to provide a descriptive account of how scientific inquiry is carried out in practice, and second, to provide an explanatory account of why scientific inquiry succeeds as well as it appears to do in arriving at genuine knowledge. The philosopher Wesley C. Salmon described scientific inquiry:
The search for scientific knowledge ends far back into antiquity. At some point in the past, at least by the time of Aristotle, philosophers recognized that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between two kinds of scientific knowledge—roughly, knowledge that and knowledge why. It is one thing to know that each planet periodically reverses the direction of its motion with respect to the background of fixed stars; it is quite a different matter to know why. Knowledge of the former type is descriptive; knowledge of the latter type is explanatory. It is explanatory knowledge that provides scientific understanding of the world.
In epistemology, criteria of truth are standards and rules used to judge the accuracy of statements and claims. They are tools of verification, and as in the problem of the criterion, the reliability of these tools is disputed. Understanding a philosophy's criteria of truth is fundamental to a clear evaluation of that philosophy. This necessity is driven by the varying, and conflicting, claims of different philosophies. The rules of logic have no ability to distinguish truth on their own. An individual must determine what standards distinguish truth from falsehood. Not all criteria are equally valid. Some standards are sufficient, while others are questionable.
Group decision-making is a situation faced when individuals collectively make a choice from the alternatives before them. The decision is then no longer attributable to any single individual who is a member of the group. This is because all the individuals and social group processes such as social influence contribute to the outcome. The decisions made by groups are often different from those made by individuals. In workplace settings, collaborative decision-making is one of the most successful models to generate buy-in from other stakeholders, build consensus, and encourage creativity. According to the idea of synergy, decisions made collectively also tend to be more effective than decisions made by a single individual. In this vein, certain collaborative arrangements have the potential to generate better net performance outcomes than individuals acting on their own. Under normal everyday conditions, collaborative or group decision-making would often be preferred and would generate more benefits than individual decision-making when there is the time for proper deliberation, discussion, and dialogue. This can be achieved through the use of committee, teams, groups, partnerships, or other collaborative social processes.
The European social model is a concept that emerged in the discussion of economic globalization and typically contrasts the degree of employment regulation and social protection in European countries to conditions in the United States. It is commonly cited in policy debates in the European Union, including by representatives of both labour unions and employers, to connote broadly "the conviction that economic progress and social progress are inseparable" and that "[c]ompetitiveness and solidarity have both been taken into account in building a successful Europe for the future".
Criticism of democracy, or debate on democracy and the different aspects of how to implement democracy best have been widely discussed. There are both internal critics and external ones who reject the values promoted by constitutional democracy.
Participative decision-making (PDM) is the extent to which employers allow or encourage employees to share or participate in organizational decision-making. According to Cotton et al., the format of PDM could be formal or informal. In addition, the degree of participation could range from zero to 100% in different participative management (PM) stages.
Collaborative e-democracy refers to a hybrid democratic model combining elements of direct democracy, representative democracy, and e-democracy. This concept, first introduced at international academic conferences in 2009, offers a pathway for citizens to directly or indirectly engage in policymaking. Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn describe it as an "innovative way to engage citizens in the democratic process," that potentially makes government "more transparent, accountable, and responsive to the needs of the people."
Epistemic democracy refers to a range of views in political science and philosophy which see the value of democracy as based, at least in part, on its ability to make good or correct decisions. Epistemic democrats believe that the legitimacy or justification of democratic government should not be exclusively based on the intrinsic value of its procedures and how they embody or express values such as fairness, equality, or freedom. Instead, they claim that a political system based on political equality can be expected to make good political decisions, and possibly decisions better than any alternative form of government .
A jury theorem is a mathematical theorem proving that, under certain assumptions, a decision attained using majority voting in a large group is more likely to be correct than a decision attained by a single expert. It serves as a formal argument for the idea of wisdom of the crowd, for decision of questions of fact by jury trial, and for democracy in general.