Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by the biologistE. O. Wilson, in which the author discusses methods that have been used to unite thesciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities.[1]
Wilson uses the termconsilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.
This book defines consilience as "Literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation."[2] The word is borrowed fromWhewell's phrasethe consilience of inductions in his bookPhilosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Whewell posited that this consilience of inductions occurs when an induction obtained from one class of facts coincides with an induction obtained from a different class. In this way a consilience is a test of the truth of a theory.[3]
The conviction that the world has a unified order and can be explained bynatural laws, was dubbed byGerald Holton the "Ionian Enchantment".
Thales of Miletus proposed that water is the unifying basis for all material things. This theory that water is fundamental is often cited as the first materialistic theory of a unified view of nature.
There is a unity of purpose forphilosophy and science. Philosophers and scientists can work together at the borders between biology, social science and the humanities.
Francis Bacon was an early advocate of data collection and its analysis as the basis of sound knowledge (Baconian method) in fields that include social science and the humanities.
Social science was pioneered byAdolphe Quetelet andAuguste Comte who developed the idea of studying behavior with scientific methods.
Unity of purpose forPostmodernism and Science. Wilson argues that humanity is driven forward by the tension between those who upon viewing order create disorder and those who upon viewing disorder create order.
TheGreek Atomists such asLeucippus andDemocritus are credited with thereductionistic idea that matter has fundamental components. Scientific investigation of this idea has resulted in unification across the natural sciences. An example is that the molecular structure ofDNA accounts forgenetic storage in living cells.
ExperimentalEpistemology. Wilson provides a modern attempt to unifyneuroscience and epistemology. He proposes it as a method for clarifying theEvolutionary basis of mismatches between physicalreality and our mental models of reality.
Positivism is a method for comparing and unifying knowledge from different disciplines. Priority is given to facts which are generated by experiment and objective observation rather than subjective speculations.
Pragmatism is a method for comparing and unifying knowledge from different disciplines. Priority is given to methods and techniques that can be demonstrated to work and have pragmatic value.
Reduction versus synthesis. Many examples are given comparing consilience by reduction (dissection of a phenomenon into its components) and consilience by synthesis (predicting higher-order phenomena from more basic physical principles). One specific example is Wilson's own work on thechemical signals that regulateinsect social behavior.
An example of consilience by reduction is Wilson's attempt to account for the prevalence ofserpent symbols in human cultures. He incorporates the activation-synthesis model ofdreaming.[4][5]
Consilience between biology disciplines. Wilson discusses the successes (cells explained in terms of theirchemical components,embryo development in terms of interactions between the cells of an embryo) but also points to the remaining problem of dealing withcomplex systems as inneuroscience andecology.
Statistical mechanics. A classical example in which the behavior of volumes of gas is explained in terms of the molecules of the gas (kinetic theory).
Quantum chemistry, the reduction of chemical properties by quantum mechanical calculations.
Explainingconsciousness andemotion in terms of brain activity. Wilson describes the neurobiological approach to accounting for consciousness and emotion in terms of brain physiology and how this effort is guided by collaboration between biologists, psychologists and philosophers.
Neurobiology ofaesthetics. Wilson proposes that it will be possible to construct a neurobiological understanding of subjective experiences that are shared and explored byart. Common neural patterns of activity will be found to correspond to fundamental aesthetic experiences.
Artificialemotion. Wilson proposes that human-like artificial intelligence will require the engineering of a computational apparatus for processing an array of rich sensory inputs and the capacity to learn from those inputs in the way that children can learn. Requires consilience between biology, psychology and computer science.
The relationship betweengenes andculture. Wilson posits that the basic element of culture is thememe. When a meme exists in a brain it has the form of a neuronal network that allows the meme to function within semanticmemory. The link from genes to culture is that our genes shape our brains (in cooperation with the environment) and our brains allow us to work with memes as the basic units of culture.
The remaining chapters are titled Chapter 8 The fitness of human nature, Chapter 9 The social sciences, Chapter 10 The arts and their interpretation, Chapter 11 Ethics and religion, Chapter 12 To what end?
Vogel Carey, Toni (2013)."Consilience. Toni Vogel Carey on discovering interconnections".philosophynow.org. Philosophy now. A magazine of ideas, issue 95. Retrieved25 January 2022.Consilience' is an important term in philosophy of science, one with a distinguished history; yet you may never have heard of it. The late Stephen Jay Gould bemoaned the fact that this "lovely and deserving term… never caught on in the 'natural selection' of English vocabulary"...
^Wilson, Edward."Consilience. The unity of knowledge"(PDF).wtf.tw. Vintage Books, Random House, New York. Retrieved25 January 2022.I remember very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. It was in the early fall of 1947, when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama. A beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodlands and along the freshwater streams of my native state.(Beginning of Chapter 1. The Ionian Enchantment.)
^Hobson, JA; McCarley, RW (December 1977). "The brain as a dream state generator: an activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process".American Journal of Psychiatry.134 (12):1335–1348.doi:10.1176/ajp.134.12.1335.PMID21570.
Fodor, Jerry (29 October 1998)."Look!".London Review of Books.20 (21).
Gillispie, Charles C. (1998). "E. O. Wilson's Consilience: A Noble, Unifying Vision, Grandly Expressed".American Scientist.86 (3):280–283.JSTOR27857028.
Henriques, Gregg R. (December 2008). "Special Section: The Problem of Psychology and the Integration of Human Knowledge: Contrasting Wilson's Consilience with the Tree of Knowledge System".Theory & Psychology.18 (6):731–755.doi:10.1177/0959354308097255.S2CID144152672.
