Re: [Fis] CONSILIENCE & interdisciplinarity

Dear Fis discussants,

In first reply to the opening message of this session, Aleks said that he is
examining the consilience not of hypotheses but of scientific tools (e.g.
calculus) and patterns. I thank Aleks for making this clear. Most of the
subsequent dissussion has been about the latter, as well about
interdisciplinarity. So, there are two notions of consilience on the table.
The first is Whewell's notion of consilience, which is about the consilience
achieved by scientific hypotheses or theories. The second is a broader
notion of consilience, which concerns the similarity of concepts,
mathematical techniques, or patterns of explanation across disciplines. Let
me refer to the latter as Wilsonian consilience, although I'm not sure
whether the labels fits because I haven't read Wilson's book. I find the
topic interesting, and I have followed the discussion with great
concentration. Unfortunately, it is not something I have thought a lot
about in the past.

If interdisciplinarity is broadened to include the interactions between
scientists and philosophers, then this is definitely a subject that also
interests me greatly, and one that I am able to talk about because I have a
dual education in science and philosophy. [I began my education in science
and mathematics, eventually holding a post-doc in the mathematics and
statistics department at Monash University. I also did an undergraduate in
the arts and humanities, eventually proceeding to the PhD level in
philosophy (Western Ontario), finally to become a Professor of Philosophy at
UW-Madison.]

As it happens, I spend more time talking to scientists (mostly mathematical
psychologists, biologists, statisticians, economists, and applied
mathematicians) than I do talking to philosophers. Over the years, I've
been struck by the fact that each discipline tends to invent its own
vocabulary. Thus, philosophers of science often talk about science in a way
that few scientists understand, and vice versa (the word 'model' is a case
in point--philosophers often use the term in the sense of model theory in
mathematics). But I have also observed simple miscommunications between
scientific disciplines that study the some topic, such as decision making,
inductive inference, or prediction. For example, mathematicians talk about
predicting a dependent variable from the values of a set of independent
variables, whereas psychologists talk about predicting a criterion from a
set of cues (terminology that arises out of theories of perception).

There are cases in which one discipline takes a concept that has a well
established meaning, such as 'relativity' in physics, and applies it or
extends it to another discipline. But on the other side of the same coin,
there are many cases in which a discipline re-invents the 'wheel'. The use
of the terms 'cue' and 'criterion' is a case in point. This is not a source
of confusion so much as a complete barrier to communication. Several
disciplines fail to learn from each other even though they have a common
topic of interest. This is a *failure* of consilience (in the Wilsonian
sense), where there ought to be consilience.

In sum, interdisciplinary communication is frequently stifled by false
consiliences (where the same word is used to refer to different things) and
by failures of consilience (where different words are used to refer to the
same thing). These are separate phenomena. I'd be interested to hear about
the difficulties that people in this group have had in understanding or
communicating with philosophers of science. In my opinion, philosophers of
science need to try harder to communicate with scientists, because this is
clearly a case in which different disciplines are interested in the same
thing, namely science.

I'd also like to hear more about failures of interdisciplinary consilience
within the sciences. (Please remember to explain the examples in enough
detail so that someone without an intimate knowledge of the sciences in
question may get the gist of it).

Cordially,
Malcolm Forster
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Mon Oct 4 01:28:13 2004