When Science Gets It Wrong: The Epistemic Authority of Collective Knowledge

When a flagship scientific journal declares a four-thousand-year human consensus an
"illusion," the burden of proof is substantial. This paper argues that Mastroianni and Gilbert's
(2023) celebrated finding — that the universal perception of moral decline is unfounded —
depends on an unstated and untested ontological assumption: that genuine moral decline, if it
existed, would manifest as a secular downward trend within a seventy-year observation
window. We term this the Stationarity Premise and show that it constitutes an Implicitly
Verified Domain — a boundary condition treated as self-evident that is in fact contestable.
The study's data are equally consistent with an oscillatory model of moral and social
dynamics, supported by a twenty-five-century tradition from Plato and Ibn Khaldun through
Sorokin's empirical synthesis and the comparative material-historical evidence of Sophia
(2026a, 2026b). We then develop a positive theory: multigenerational collective judgment
functions as temporal integration — an extension of Hayek's dispersed knowledge argument
from its synchronic domain to the diachronic case — encoding information about long-cycle
social phenomena that no single-era study is structurally equipped to produce. Finally, we
derive five conditions under which collective knowledge is more likely to be epistemically
superior to scientific consensus and show that the moral decline case satisfies all five while
the paradigmatic cases of legitimate scientific override satisfy none. The paper's conclusion is
not that moral decline is real; it is that science has not shown it to be an illusion, and that the
costs of misallocating the burden of proof in this direction are epistemically significant.