A consensus theory of truth is the process of taking statements to be true simply because people generally agree upon them.
Expressed in practical terms, a normative theory, more properly called a policy, tells agents how they ought to act.
A policy is frequently stated in the form of a piece of advice called a heuristic, a maxim, a norm, a rule, a slogan, and so on.
The state of consensus may be ideal in its own nature, conceived in the matrix of actual experience by way of intellectual operations like abstraction, extrapolation, and limit formation.
Imre Lakatos characterizes it as a "watered down" form of provable truth propounded by some sociologists of knowledge, particularly Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi.
[2] Philosopher Nigel Warburton argues that the truth by consensus process is not reliable, general agreement upon something does not make it true.