Philosophy is not my usual bedtime reading, but I think this pre-print paper by Finnur Dellsén looks at an aspect of what might be called 'contentious science' in an illuminating way. 'Where there is no harmony, there should be trust'. The author is a postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin, where he is working on this programme...
http://whenexpertsdisagree.ucd.ie/
The paper.
When Expert Disagreement Supports the Consensus : Finnur Dellsén
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. The Australasian Journal of Philosophy is available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/.
Abstract
It is often suggested that disagreement among scientific experts is a reason not to trust those experts, even about matters on which they are in agreement. In direct opposition to this view, I argue here that the very fact that there is disagreement among experts on a given issue provides a positive reason for non-experts to trust that the experts really are justified in their attitudes towards consensus theories. I show how this line of thought can be spelled out in three distinct frameworks for non-deductive reasoning, viz. Bayesian ConfirmationTheory, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Inferential Robustness Analysis.