Re: [Fis] CONSILIENCE: When separate inductions jump together

Dear Malcolm and FIS colleagues,

Many thanks for the elegant Introduction to the theme. First, I was much
impressed by the side comment that Whewell had also coined the term
"scientist" ---I had read that it was used in the meetings of the British
Ass. for the Adv. of Sci, sort of an 'emergence' but was unknown of the
author.

I can more or less follow the original philosophical meaning of the term (I
will return to it in future exchanges, as from my biological interests, it
may contain quite a few "sensory" correlates, I mean, the consilience of
different sensorial modalities stemming out from a common object ---the
really important "binding problem"). In what follows I attempt a rough
responses to your questions:

>(1) Is the consilience of inductions a clear notion? What does it mean
>for facts to be of a different kind? Why is this especially significant?

In my opinion, heavily contaminated by E.O. Wilson's approach (where the
term means a very relaxed sort of "congruence" or "cooperation" or "common
wisdom" among separate disciplines), it is not quite clear yet. At the time
being I could only respond by using Karl's multi-dimensional partitional
approach: consilience relates to the formal determination of extents of
shared properties. Besides, the search for the most economical descriptions
(Occam's finally) seems to be driving our perceptual/motor apparatus as an
essential evolutionary adaptation, I think.

>(2) Do examples of consilience occur in sciences outside of physics? One
>might think not because disparate phenomena are never, or very rarely,
>successfully unified by theories outside of physics. This may be true to
>some extent, but it does seem that Darwin, for example, postulated
>connections between disparate phenomena that were previously unforeseen
>and uncontemplated.

Perhaps the most classical cases are in physics, for the neat formalisms
implied (I am reminded "The quest for unity: the adventure of physics." by
E. Klein and M. Lachieze-Rey). But after the molecular-biological
revolution and the whole bioinformatic enterprise, the whole fields of
biology are full of convergence (or strictly 'consilience'?) cases: eg, in
metabolism, development, 'beauplans', neural types of organization, etc.

>(3) Is Whewell right to claim that the consilience of inductions belong
>only to the best established theories that the history of science
>contains? Does the consilience of inductions always point to the truth, as
>Whewell claims? Or does it point to something else?

In my view, it could also point to the fundamental "adaptive" drive of
human knowledge... (and somehow the "information skeletons" we individually
extract, communicate, socially circulate, re-elaborate, etc... in the
unending Wilsonian consilience among disciplines, or better following
Piaget's "circle of the sciences").

all the best

Pedro

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Received on Thu Sep 16 14:30:01 2004