Abstract
There is a growing concern about the epistemic harms that may be caused by what appears to be politically and economically motivated dissent within scientific communities. Acknowledging the urgency to develop criteria for normatively appropriate dissent in science, many philosophers have turned to Helen Longino’s account of epistemically ideal communities suggesting that dissenters as well as consensus scientists ought to follow the four criteria of publicly recognized scientific venues, uptake of criticism, shared standards, and tempered equality of intellectual authority. I argue that Longino’s account is in need of refinement. In order to minimize the epistemic harms that may be caused by scientific dissent, the criterion of uptake needs to include a requirement for a fair distribution of epistemic responsibility.
