[Fis] CONSILIENCE: When separate inductions jump together

Another question that has been raised is whether the attempt to apply the
same concept, such as 'entropy' across various disciplines counts as a
consilience; and if not, why not. Obviously, there is a danger in being too
liberal about what counts as a consilience. That is why I concentrated on
an example that involved, in part, the agreement of independent
measurements. In such case, the consilience is not only more convincing,
but it is based, in part, on empirical evidence.

Quantum mechanics is an interesting case ("The Miraculous Consilience of
Quantum Mechanics", http"//philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/, top). There is a
kind of consilience achieved between sequential spin measurements of a
single election and the spin correlations amongst three elections in an
entangled state. The consilience does not involve the agreement of
independent measurements of some parameter, but it does have an empirical
component. Briefly, it arises from the fact that spin-1/2 operators (the
Pauli operators) anti-commute. That property is forced on us in order to
accommodate the experimental facts about sequential measurements, which then
makes correct predictions about correlations in entangled states. Local
hidden variable theories (a la Bell) get these predictions wrong, which
proves that standard causal modeling cannot explain at least some quantum
phenomena.

The claim is that a merely conceptual "consilience" has to be subject to
some kind of empirical test before it has any real force. Perhaps this
raises the bar too high, so that only physics can achieve a genuine
consiliences? Or perhaps there are well understood counterexamples to this,
or perhaps this is a different way of preventing the slide towards the view
that almost anything can count as consilience? These are things that I
would like to know more about.

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Received on Thu Sep 23 22:38:42 2004