CONSILIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE
EDWARD O. WILSON
Harvard myrmecologist (ant expert), sociobiologist, naturalist, conversationalist, advocate for biodiversity and champion of the notion of the unity of knowledge.
[1929- ]
Wilson (1998: 9, 66) acknowledges that the first step towards converting his “minority,” “metaphysical,” unificationist world-view will be “clarifying the still poorly understood operations composing the mind.” Undaunted by this difficult challenge, he boldly asserts (1998: 70-71):
Better to steer by a lodestar than to drift across a meaningless sea.
Whewell, William (1840) The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon their History. 2 vols, London. 2nd ed, 1847.
Wilson, E. O. (1999) Consilience. Random House, New York.
Gould, Stephen Jay (2003) The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities. Three Rivers press, New York.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD ON CONSILIENCE
In his essay collection, The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox, Stephen Jay Gould characterizes (2003: 216) E. O. Wilson’s knowledge unification agenda as “a chain of reductionism.” For Gould, Wilson’s “firm belief” is being “proclaimed as a metaphysical assumption” rather than “proven scientific reality.” Gould is disconcerted that Wilson’s reductive approach appears to be:
poised to make its boldest move upward—starting with (and fundamentally encouraged by) our startling initial successes in beginning to understand the workings of the human brain, and then moving through the social sciences and eventually, and ultimately into the traditional humanities of arts, ethics, and even parts of religion.
Gould (2003: 191) cannot endorse what he sees as Wilson’s
attempts to break the most complex phenomenology (of living things and social systems) into constituent units, all ultimately subject to explanation by the unifying physical laws regulating these basic components.
Gould is mindful of the inherent complexities, unpredictabilities and uncertainties pertaining to the human arena. He reminds us (2003: 194) that “[b]iology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics, and the arts equivalently more complex than biology.” For Gould “is easier to go backward through the branching corridors than to go forward,” Gould (2003: 202) is convinced that any reductionist ambitions are thwarted by “emergence, or the entry of novel explanatory rules in complex systems,” and “contingency,” the ubiquity of “unique historical ‘accidents’ that cannot in principle be predicted, but that remain fully accessible to factual explanation after their occurrence.”
Gould drives his point home with explicit reference to ethics:
We can surely determine that a majority of human societies have preferred one moral code over another, and we may even be able to devise a satisfactory evolutionary explanation for the decision. But the magisterium of ethics asks a very different primary question, unaddressed (and unaddressable) by such interesting and important factual data: What moral code ought we follow? What ethical duties define a life well lived?
The difference between the two domains is in the magnitude of the problem, not the principles needed for its solution.
Everyone knows that the social sciences are hypercomplex. They are inherently far more difficult than physics and chemistry, and as a result they, not physics and chemistry, should be called the hard sciences. They just seem easier because we can talk with other human beings but not with photons, gluons, and sulphide radicals. Consequently, too many social-science textbooks are a scandal of banality.
In (1998) book Consilience, E.O. Wilson proposes a vision for a unification and synthesis of knowledge based on reductionism and a hierarchy of complexity for the disciplines. Wilson (1998: 8-9) points to an “ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy.” He decries the lack of communication between discrete academic disciplines, each with “its own practitioners, language, modes of analysis, and standards of validation.” Wilson holds that these fragmentations “are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.”
Wilson appropriates the term “consilience” from the Victorian philosopher of science, William Whewell. Whewell had specifically refered to the junctures in scientific methodology when apparently disparate observations and pieces of experimental evidence “jump together” to form coherent and workable theories. In Whewell’s original words (1840: 230):
the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus jumped together, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And as I shall have occasion to refer to this particular feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; and will term it the Consilence of Inductions.
Later in his treatise, Whewell (1840: 469) states that:
The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.
It is clear that Gould’s view (2003: is that E. O. Wilson’s reductionist agenda ultimately misappropriates Whelwell’s “consilience.” Gould (2003: 225) declares:
We will not explain Agincourt by the physics of the longbow, or September 11 by the neurology of psychopathology…
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
American Evolutionary Biologist and Essayist [1941-2002]
