First… sorry about getting your name wrong… i wrote that with my 2 month old on my lap, and it makes my concentration wander.

The distinction between our two views, I think, is a foundational disagreement on premises. You think “it would be odd” for “two separate groups each who negotiate in the ways [i] describe but then come up with opposite conclusions”

I think this is a perfectly normal happening, it happens on a daily basis in medicine, in new fields like the ones described in the paper, in any number of social and political situations… Experts (and i don’t mean pundits) commenting on recent north american elections are an excellent example of this… would you refrain from giving either the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ the right of knowledge creation because they don’t agree with the other.

We all start from separate premises and work in different contexts, those contexts and premises have a fundamental effect on what can be considered knowledge (depending on the field, please do not tell me that math (or some other ‘fact’) doesn’t work that way.) I would not, indeed could not, philosophically claim that what I’m saying applies to everything… it probably doesn’t.

Verification is actually in the paper… but it is contextual, and varied… 🙂 you see, we don’t even use these words the same.

So… from my view, with the uptake of speed and communications, interactions between like minded, well informed experts drastically increases the number of people in a position to ‘create knowledge’ and the fact that so much of it is in public, creates an ‘abundance of knowledge’. It wouldn’t follow from your premises.

And, just so you know, I had guessed you as a modernist and these are exactly the same objections that every modernist makes to this kind of work. The world is determinist, there are transferable observable premises that people can share, and truth/knowledge is objective and can be seen, observed and finalized. I don’t believe it.