Chapter XIII: Consilience | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

                “Many people, even many scientists, harbor a narrow view of science—as controlled, 

        replicated experiments performed in the laboratory and consisting quintessentially of physics, 

        chemistry, and molecular biology.  The essence of science, however, is best conveyed by its Latin 

        etymology: scientia, meaning “knowledge.”

                The scientific method is simply that body of practices best suited for obtaining reliable 

        knowledge.  The practices vary among fields: the controlled laboratory experiment is possible in 

        molecular biology, physics, and chemistry, but it is either impossible, immoral, or illegal in many 

        other fields customarily considered scientific, including all of the historical sciences: astronomy, 

        epidemiology, evolutionary biology, most of the Earth sciences, and paleontology.  If the scientific 

        method can be defined as those practices best suited for obtaining knowledge in a particular field, 

        then science itself is simply the body of knowledge obtained by those practices... Science, then, is 

        the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything, whether it be the vagaries of human nature, 

        the role of great figures in history, or the origins of life itself.”
        – John Brockman^I

        “There is only one way to understand the universe and all within it, however imperfectly, and that 

        is through science.”
        – E. O. Wilson^II

        “In later life [Einstein] aimed to weld everything else into a single parsimonious system, space 

        with time and motion, gravity with electromagnetism and cosmology.  He approached but never 

        captured that grail.  All scientists, Einstein not excepted, are children of Tantalus, frustrated by the 

        failure to grasp that which seems within reach.”

        – E. O. Wilson^III

        “Extraterrestrials would, of course, wish to make a message sent to us as comprehensible as 

        possible.  But how could they? Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta stone?  We believe there

        is.  We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how

        different, must have.  That common language is science and mathematics. The Laws Of Nature are

        the same everywhere.  The patterns in the spectra of distant stars and galaxies are the same as

        those for the Sun or for appropriate laboratory experiments: not only do the same chemical 

        elements exist everywhere in the universe, but also the same laws of quantum mechanics that

        govern the absorption and emission of radiation by atoms apply everywhere as well.  Distant

        galaxies revolving about one another follow the same laws of gravitational physics as govern the 

        motion of an apple falling to Earth, or Voyager on its way to the stars.  The patterns of nature are 

        everywhere the same.”

        – Carl Sagan^IV

        “There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us... Those are some of the 

        things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution.”
        – Carl Sagan^V

        “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
        – Carl Sagan^VI

        The unity of knowledge, otherwise known as consilience, universalism, or convergence is the argument that all of knowledge is part of one overarching system of understanding, necessarily implying that there are rational connections between the “islands of knowledge” we happen to be in possession of at a given time.^VII  This is of course implied by naturalists' lack of dualism and by the view that the body of knowledge produced by one's epistemology is the singular ontology (the cosmos).  But the emphasis here is on the epistemological consequences of the fact: because there is one interconnected cosmos, so too our knowledge of it must be guided in part by finding and explaining such connections.

        This is largely taken for granted in the so-called hard sciences; most understand that biology is complex chemistry is complex physics (remember the ontological stack).^VIII  But for practical and cultural reasons, social scientists are not as keen to understand this, that sociology is just complex psychology is just complex biology (and so on).^IX  Entomologist E. O. Wilson popularized the term consilience to deal with this issue, which novelist C. P. Snow dubbed the two cultures problem, that scientists tended to appreciate the humanities moreso than humanities scholars appreciated the sciences.^X  E. O. Wilson envisioned a third culture which married science and the humanities through evolutionary theory: traditionally humanities topics such as aesthetics would be grounded in the sciences by recognizing their evolutionary roots (by seeing our tastes, poetics, and culture as psychological adaptations, or at least riding atop them).^XI

        It's always worth asking oneself, when one encounters a novel result in a field or sub-field: how does this fit in with what was previously known within other fields?  Is the result consilient with what is known?  How well established was what one already thought they knew going in?  This is tantamount to paying attention to logical coherence and replication (or otherwise, falsification) between the bodies of knowledge produced by differing fields of study.  If a novel result contradicts a known result from previous, more well-established evidentiary literature, it is worth being skeptical of the claim even if it appears to be the consequence of a decent study, itself.^XII  If the discrepancy persists, one must indeed figure out how to square the two results.  This is of course only more true if the new idea is mere speculation, and not empirically motivated at all!
        The main function of a great scientific theory is to unify previously separate phenomena through elegant laws.^XIII  Before Sir Isaac Newton's universal law of gravitation, it was thought that the heavens and the work-a-day goings-on of Earth were two fundamentally different places obeying fundamentally different laws: yet he famously derived an equation of motion that works for the moon as well as it works for an apple!^XIV  Likewise, Charles Darwin unified all living things (in fact, he refined the definition of a living thing in the process) through the theory of evolution by natural selection which gave rise to everything from blades of grass to giraffes.^XV  Dmitri Mendeleyev (and Niels Bohr) unified the many chemical elements such that they could be understood as varying on a central theme—essentially differences of degree rather than kind, as it was showed that they are largely heavier or lighter, with greater-or-fewer valence electrons.^XVI

        Cox and Forshaw focus on the overall universality of the scientific method (that is, the scientific epistemology) across domains of knowledge acquisition, whereas E. O. Wilson and P. Wallace focus on how the results portray a coherent world (or ontology).  Remember that, however different the methodologies (and results) of varied fields may look, they are all only flawed implementations of a shared epistemology (and a shared world).^XVII

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See This Idea Is Brilliant by Brockman (pp. xxv-xxvi).

II. See Letters To A Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson (Liveright Publishing Corporation) (2013) (pp. 169).

III. See Consilience by E. O. Wilson (pp. 5).

IV. See Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 312-313).

V. See “Carl Sagan - COSMOS - Evolution” uploaded to YouTube by the official carlsagandotcom account (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZpsVSVRsZk) which is I believe from the “One Voice In The Cosmic Fugue” episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Sagan, Druyan, and Soter.

VI. See “Carl Sagan: If You Wish To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch, You Must First Invent The Universe.” uploaded by YouTube user pkrumins (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM), which is a scene from Cosmos by Sagan et al.

VII. See Consilience by E. O. Wilson; Universal: A Guide To The Cosmos by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Da Capo Press) (2017); Convergence by Watson (though I have yet to finish reading these latter two books); and “Our Narrow Definition Of Science” by Sam Harris (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2014 / 2015) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25372) in This Idea Must Die edited by Brockman (pp. 136-138).

VIII. See the “Reductionism And Emergence” chapter.

IX. An excellent book on this topic is The Blank Slate by Pinker.

X. See "The Second Law Of Thermodynamics" by Steven Pinker (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 17-20); Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 17, 33-34, 389-390, 455) which further cites The Two Cultures And The Second Law [sic] by C. P. Snow (1959 / 1998) (pp. 14-15) (though I have yet to read this work); and Consilience by E. O. Wilson (pp. 43, 136-137, 329).

XI. See Consilience by E. O. Wilson.

XII. Think back to the many scholars who were skeptical of claims in the psychology literature of evidence for ESP before a failure to replicate this specific result, due to their knowledge of how the world works from the underlying fields of physics, chemistry, and biology. The result was never consilient with the rest of known science, and so the burden of evidence was much higher than it otherwise would have been—see the “Knowledge As Provisional” chapter which further cites “Daniel Kahneman — Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” by Shermer and Kahneman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CFjERpwFys) (6:14 – 13:54, 34:59 – 36:28)

XIII. See Parallel Worlds by Kaku (pp. 24-25) and Convergence by Watson (pp. xxiii-xxvii, xxix-xxxi).

XIV. See Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 72-73) and Parallel Worlds by Kaku (pp. 24-25).

XV. See Convergence by Watson (pp. 66-77) and “Carl Sagan - COSMOS - Evolution” by Sagan, Druyan, and Soter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZpsVSVRsZk).

XVI. See Convergence by Watson (pp. xvii-xix, 81-103); Elemental by James (pp. iv-v, 58-71); and Chemistry by Atkins (pp. 13-19, 95).

XVII. See the “Methodology” chapter.