ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews four key discussions that have gone beyond the conventional wisdom, interrogating them for their implicit perspectives about best practices: Don K. Price's "spectrum from truth to power"; Yaron Ezrahi's matrix of political and scientific consensus and disagreement; David Collingridge and Colin Reeve's under- and over-critical models; and Sheila Jasanoff's boundary work. Jasanoff develops the concept of serviceable truth as a goal for informed policymaking, one that attempts to accommodate expert demands for rigor and political demands for fairness. By prescribing experts' behavior under particular circumstances, Ezrahi in effect offers a set of best practices for science advisors. Clark has observed the incompleteness of the concept of serviceable truth because of its lack of precise strategic guidance for decision makers. In the pursuit of best practices, the chapter examines the strategies against criteria for the appraisal of good socio-technical analysis and derives a set of hypotheses to guide further research.
