Editing Consensus theory of truth (section)

==Critiques==
It is very difficult to find any philosopher of note who asserts a ''bare'', ''naive'', or ''pure'' consensus theory of truth, in other words, a treatment of truth that is based on actual consensus in an actual community without further qualification.  One obvious critique is that not everyone agrees to consensus theory, implying that it may not be true by its own criteria.  Another problem is defining how we know that consensus is achieved without falling prey to an infinite regress. Even if everyone agrees to a particular proposition, we may not know that it is true until everyone agrees that everyone agrees to it. Bare consensus theories are frequent topics of discussion, however, evidently because they serve the function of reference points for the discussion of alternative theories.

If consensus equals truth, then truth can be made by forcing or organizing a consensus, rather than being discovered through experiment or observation, or existing separately from consensus. The principles of mathematics also do not hold under consensus truth because mathematical propositions build on each other. If the consensus declared 2+2=5 it would render the practice of mathematics where 2+2=4 impossible.

[[Imre Lakatos]] characterizes it as a "watered down" form of provable [[truth]] propounded by some [[sociology of knowledge|sociologists of knowledge]], particularly [[Thomas Kuhn]] and [[Michael Polanyi]].<ref>{{cite book|title=Philosophical Papers|author=Imre Lakatos|author-link=Imre Lakatos|chapter=Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes|pages=8|year=1978|publisher=Cambridge University Press|chapter-url=http://www.csun.edu/~vcsoc00i/classes/s680f11/Lakatos.pdf|isbn=978-0-521-28031-0|access-date=1 October 2016}}</ref>

Philosopher [[Nigel Warburton]] argues that the truth by consensus process is not reliable, general agreement upon something does not make it true. Warburton says that one reason for the unreliability of the consensus theory of truth, is that people are gullible, easily misled, and prone to wishful thinking{{emdash}}they believe an assertion and espouse it as truth in the face of overwhelming evidence and facts to the contrary, simply because they wish that things were so.<ref name=Warburton/>{{rp|135}}