Consilience
Encyclopedia
Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept
Greek philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BCE and continued through the Hellenistic period, at which point Ancient Greece was incorporated in the Roman Empire...

 of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos
Cosmos
In the general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from the Greek term κόσμος , meaning "order" or "ornament" and is antithetical to the concept of chaos. Today, the word is generally used as a synonym of the word Universe . The word cosmos originates from the same root...

, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. The rational
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...

 view was recovered during the high Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, separated from theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

 during the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 and found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment. Then, with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries.

Modern usage

The word consilience was apparently coined by William Whewell
William Whewell
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.-Life and career:Whewell was born in Lancaster...

, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840. In this synthesis Whewell explained that, "The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...

, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction obtained from another different class. Thus Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs."

Modern views understand that each branch of knowledge studies a subset of reality that depends on factors studied in other branches. Atomic physics
Atomic physics
Atomic physics is the field of physics that studies atoms as an isolated system of electrons and an atomic nucleus. It is primarily concerned with the arrangement of electrons around the nucleus and...

 underlies the workings of chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

, which studies emergent
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....

 properties that in turn are the basis of biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

. Psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 can no longer be separated from the study of properties emergent from the interaction of neuron
Neuron
A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...

s and synapse
Synapse
In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell...

s. Sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

, economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

, and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

 are each, in turn, studies of properties emergent from the interaction of countless individual humans.

The fact that all these different areas of research are studying one real, existing universe is an apparent explanation of why generalizations arrived at in one area have often helped in understanding other areas. Consilience is thus often used as an argument for scientific realism
Scientific realism
Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be...

 by philosophers of science.

Edward O. Wilson

Although the concept of consilience in Whewell's sense was widely discussed by philosophers of science, the term was unfamiliar to the broader public until the end of the 20th century, when it was vividly revived in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson. In this book, Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities...

,
a 1998 book by the humanist biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the culture gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of C. P. Snow
C. P. Snow
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester CBE was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions with the UK government...

's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). Wilson's assertion was that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understanding the details, to lend to all inquirers "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." Wilson's concept is a much broader notion of consilience than that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.

A parallel view lies in the term universology
Universology
Universology literally means "the science of the universe." Popularizing universologic science was a life's work for 19th century intellectual Stephen Pearl Andrews, a futurist utopian. The word can be used synonymously with consilience, a term Edward Osborne Wilson has popularized with his...

, which literally means "the science of the universe." Universology was first advocated for the study of the interconnecting principles and truths of all domains of knowledge by Stephen Pearl Andrews
Stephen Pearl Andrews
Stephen Pearl Andrews was an American individualist anarchist and author of several books on Individualist anarchism.-Early life and work:...

, a 19th century utopian futurist and anarchist.

Election methods

The word consilience has been adapted to refer to a specific process of checks and balances in election methods that satisfy the following conditions: (1) At least two different ballot tabulation methods shall be relied upon to achieve the official election tally; (2) Each tabulation method employed shall have separate and distinct oversight; (3) Neither tabulation method, nor its oversight and personnel involved, shall communicate with one another during this checking process to prevent cheating; (4) Tallies derived from each ballot method must agree within a margin of discrepancy that would not overturn the outcome of the election; (5) There must be physical paper evidence of the ballots, i.e., at least one of the two methods employed must rely on hand-counted paper ballots or hand-counted voter verified paper trails; (6) At least two of the tabulation methods must occur at the location where the votes are cast, e.g. the precinct, the poll site; and (7) The process shall commence immediately upon the close of polls and preferably shall conclude without severing the chain of custody of the participants conducting the process.

If consilience is not achieved upon the first exercise of the election's checks and balances process described above (i.e., the margin of discrepancy of the ballot tallies do not agree), then an investigation including more tabulation shall immediately ensue.

Commonly, consilience refers to two full hand count tabulation methods if they are achieved by separate and distinct oversight that do not communicate; but, for example, in races surpassing 400,000 ballots cast (to ensure 99% statistical accuracy), it can also mean the concordance of tallies from a 10% sample of paper ballots randomly selected from each and every voting site when compared with the tallies from optiscan-type electronic voting machines.

See also

  • Holism
    Holism
    Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...

  • Systems theory
    Systems theory
    Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...

  • Intersubjectivity
    Intersubjectivity
    Intersubjectivity is a term used in philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology to describe a condition somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity, one in which a phenomenon is personally experienced but by more than one subject....

  • Reductionism
    Reductionism
    Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...

  • Syncretism
    Syncretism
    Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...

  • Tree of Knowledge System
    Tree of Knowledge System
    ]The Tree of Knowledge System is a theoretical approach to the unification of psychology developed by Gregg Henriques, associate professor and Director of the Combined-Integrated Doctoral Program in Clinical and School Psychology at James Madison University.The outline of the system was published...

  • Unity of science
    Unity of science
    The unity of science is a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole.Even though, for example, physics and politics are distinct disciplines, the thesis of the unity of science says that in principle they must be part of a unified intellectual endeavor,...

  • Unified Science
    Unified Science
    "Unified Science" can refer to any of three related strands in contemporary thought.* Belief in the unity of science was a central tenet of logical positivism. Different logical positivists construed this doctrine in several different ways, e.g...

  • Coherentism in the philosophy of science
  • The Two Cultures
    The Two Cultures
    The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures—namely the sciences and the humanities—and that this was a major...


External links

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