Beginning with some historical issues associated with knowledge and its relationship to the food system, we engage in a discussion of traditional versus scientific knowledge, exploring how each is envisioned and their interpenetration, and arguing that both, as currently generally used, are legitimate and should be part of a dialog of knowledges (dialogo de saberes).

Science always has occupied a special niche in society because of its perceived and proven truth value, which comes from its ostensibly unbiased, rigorous, accurate, precise, dispassionate, and metaphysical nature. After all, isn't science practiced in laboratories and universities quite apart from the "real world," the world of opinion, supposition, business, politics, and religion? But is it? As discussed in this chapter, the answer is "no," because science, in many senses, is a social endeavor, one subject to the vagaries of personal bias, the quest for recognition and funding, peer and social pressure, and tradition. Science may indeed be special relative to other endeavors, but this does not mean that its product – knowledge – should be accepted without question. Science can be wrong, but only temporarily, as it is a self-correcting enterprise that, in light of continual hypothesis testing, eventually fixes its own errors.

This chapter outlines the ways in which the philosophy of science handles the problem of inconsistency in scientific theorising. After raising this problem in ,will summarise the standard view of inconsistency in the analytical philosophy of science (SVI). In , we will touch on the break with the standard view of inconsistency in the analytical philosophy of science as initiated by Kuhn and continued by Lakatos and Laudan.will discuss the most recent trends that re-evaluate the emergence and the presence of inconsistencies in scientific theorising.will draw the conclusions that serve as guidelines for the next steps of our train of thought.

This chapter critically discusses the prominent dialogical accounts of logic and deduction proposed by Lorenzen, Hintikka, and Lakatos. It is argued that, while they contain valuable insights, Lorenzen’s dialogical logic and Hintikka’s game-theoretical semantics ultimately both fail to provide a satisfactory philosophical account of logic and deduction in dialogical terms. This critical evaluation then leads to a precise formulation of the dialogical model defended in the book, the Prover–Skeptic model, which is by and large inspired by Lakatos’ ‘proofs and refutations’ model, but with some important modifications.