RE: [Fis] three consiliences

Dear colleagues,

Maybe it is an abuse on Whewellian consilience, but I keep thinking that
distinguishing between three types of consilience is useful. In the
Wilsonian view there is no distinction between the two extra consiliences I
have dubbed as interdisciplinary and the global (or closure) ones; and
besides, a rather naive conceptualization based on "reduction" covers for
the two conflated aspects.

Following P. Suppe's recent work (Representation and Invariance of
Scientific Structures, 2002), where defending the reductionist strategy he
argues that "scientific reduction is but hard work... and not a single
really significant representation theorem providing the stiff backbone for
some important claim about reduction of one part of science to another has
been proved or even stated." (p. 467 --he continues on the discussion of
the thermodynmics/statistical mechanics case). Taking seriously
reductionism (and not as an ideology) we might argue that the interest or
merit of reduction has to be accompanied by some notion of "epistemic
distance", in the sense that the scientific practitioner has to be aware of
the factual incommunicability between the different conceptual worlds.

Who has to be aware and work out the consequences of this "epistemic
distance" limitation? Either the internalist or the externalist approach to
science (using Malcolm's)? Both, I think, and then they somehow intermix,
and mutually reveal the absence of interesting global theories of human
cognition... Whitehead, arguing on the singular importance of the cipher
'zero' and its historical consequences, says: "Civilization advances by
extending the number of important operations which we can perform without
thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a
battle --they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses,
and must only be made at decisive moments."

The minimization of that epistemic distance among heterogeneous trains of
thought (belonging to factually incommunicated disciplinary worlds) appears
as the crucial factor that the interdisciplinary scientist deals with: the
"art" of the trade. The matter of interdisciplinary consilience.

And to approach the third aspect of consilience (global, closure), a new
metaphor would be needed: perhaps the "cloud" --already appeared in some
messages-- rather than the terrain or the field. The different sciences,
like clouds, have to 'cover' the whole world of human practice. They move,
approach, mix, etc., above in the conceptual sky, as the earthbound
practitioner uses and works on them... such knowledge accumulations,
knowledge creations, continuously "wrap" our social lives, but not only the
modality we call scientific--as other forms of knowledge are socially
needed too. But in any case, we have to examine whether the scientific
knowledge of the epoch, with all its heterogeneity of worlds, scales and
strata, adequately performs such consilience "closure", or not.

I would love connecting these confuse expostulations with the nice
formal-numerical arguments of these days.

best regards

Pedro

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Received on Thu Nov 4 14:56:23 2004