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Consider a counter example to this reduction to consensus: Discounted cash flows are very widely and commonly used in finance management, with hybrids in academic articles represented mathematically, yet according to Singer (1994) there has been no reported success to date (personally I think Capital would be more promising and appropriate). Here we have a very large consensus and a very large failure on the one hand, compared with science’s very large consensus and very large success on the other. How can relativism account for the difference between failure and success when all concerned agree that their representations are correct? Any account has to include the epistemic contribution of the subject matter, which means making reference to content. The difference between social and physical systems must involve how content captures the reality being modelled in some way, bearing in mind that the reality is only known through the model.
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Singer, A. E. (1994). DCF without forecasts. Omega, International Journal of Management Science, 22(3), 221–235.
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Rowlands, S. Christopher Pincock: Mathematics and Scientific Representation . Sci & Educ 22, 867–872 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9534-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9534-9