Consilience: Not limited to 'vertical integration' alone?
"'Consilience' is an important term in philosophy of science, one with a distinguished history; yet you may never have heard of it." ...
Here is the astronomer John Herschel in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830):
"The surest and best characteristic of a well founded and extensive induction... is when verifications of it spring up, as it were, spontaneously, into notice, from quarters where they might be least expected, or even among instances of that very kind which were at first considered hostile to them. Evidence of this kind is irresistible, and compels assent with a weight which scarcely any other possesses." (Sec. 180)
"The Scottish thinkers were aware that there are invisible 'backhands' as well as 'forehands'; but their emphasis was on the upside of surprises , believing as they did that the very foundation of society - language and law, money and property - arise by the 'wisdom of nature' with the help of conscious human design.
Friedrich Hayek (who dedicated his Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics to Popper) and Popper (who dedicated his Conjectures and Refutations to Hayek) were among the few twentieth-century thinkers to embrace this Scottish Enlightenment idea. Popper even went so far as to claim that the "main task" (his italics) of the 'theoretical social sciences' is to study 'the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions,' and 'to analyse in this way the existence and the functioning of institutions (such as police forces or insurance companies or schools or governments) and of social collectives (such as states or nations or classes). (Conjectures, p.125)"
INDIVIDUAL
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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
HUMANISTIC -------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
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GROUP
psychology philosophy mind | natural philosophy scientific evidence |
| culture social sciences language schools | law institutions: police forces insurance companies governments states, nations |
INDIVIDUAL
|
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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
HUMANISTIC -------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
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GROUP
mind theory 'The Two cultures' | physics body |
social culture | politic |
"The purpose of the workshop was to bring together scholars from across the sciences and humanities to explore the potential of an alternative approach—an approach that is referred to as “vertical integration” ( Tooby and Cosmides 1992 ; Slingerland 2008a ) or, increasingly commonly, “consilience” ( Wilson 1998 ).
Consilience is often framed in terms of bringing the study of humanistic issues into the same framework as the study of non-human species and non-biotic phenomena (e.g., Tooby & Cosmides 1992 ; Wilson 1998 ; Dennett 2009 )." p.3.
"Perhaps the most common way of characterizing the difference between the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities—at least from the humanities side of the fence—is to invoke the idea of different modes of knowledge. The humanities are typically characterized as involving a unique mode of apprehension, consciousness studying consciousness, or “understanding” ( Verstehen ), whereas the sciences engage in mechanistic “explanation” ( Erklären ). The latter, on this account, is adequate to deal with the movements of dumb, inert physical objects, but the former is the only way to grasp human meaning." p.10. (Introduction)
Introduction: Creating Consilience: Toward a second Wave. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285946887_Introduction_Creating_Consilience_Toward_a_second_Wave
Previously on W2tQ: inc. 'Consilience'
Reprise: Hodges' model introduction
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965