Introduction: Evidence Critique and Contestation as a Challenge in Academia and Society

Evidence is not only an extremely important but also highly contested resource in democratically constituted knowledge societies. As a constitutive basis of knowledge and a guarantor of credibility and validity, evidence serves to justify knowledge claims and decisions. However, the flipside of its rise in importance is the phenomenon of increasing evidence contestation which is the focus of this book. In the Introduction, the editors lay some conceptual groundwork and outline how processes of evidence criticism have emerged. In this context, evidence and its contestation are discussed as contested concepts in themselves. Commonalities, differences and consequences of evidence criticism and contestation in academia and society are among the important questions that the authors address. Referring to the individual chapters, the Introduction outlines how actors in both, science and society at large, contribute to and deal with dissent and what this means for knowledge societies.