Two meanings of

Consilience
by Massimo Pigliucci

My basic theses:
Knowledge is a heterogeneous category that
does not admit of Wilson-type consilience.
Applying the type of knowledge emerging from
the natural sciences to (some) other domains is a
category mistake and ought to be avoided.
Wilson-type consilience is actually a scientistic
an anti-intellectual enterprise.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who,

by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated
and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity
at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and
have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second
Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.
Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have
you read a work of Shakespeare's?

There is no such thing as

philosophy-free science;
there is only science whose
philosophical baggage is
taken on board without
examination.
-Daniel Dennett, Darwins
Dangerous Idea

So, what is consilience?

The Consilience of Inductions takes place when

an Induction, obtained from one class of facts,
coincides with an Induction obtained from
another different class. Thus Consilience
is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it
occurs.
-William Whewell, The Philosophy of the
Inductive Sciences

To dissect a phenomenon into its elements ... is

consilience by induction.
To reconstitute it, and especially to predict with
knowledge gained by reduction how nature
assembled it in the first place, is
consilience by synthesis.
-Wilson, p. 74

performing
arts literary

literature
visual arts
music

criticism

philosophy

social sciences

evolutionary
biology

neurobiology

physics

Two types of consilience reductionism

,
e
ru in
t
e ies ce
b
y h fl en
a
m ug vid
e
o
Ontological (the claim is that
f
th e o
the
bottom
level
determines
everything
c
a
f
else - no emergent properties)
Epistemological (the claim is that
is
knowledge of the bottom level yields
h
n
i
knowledge of all other levels)
y in d
d
o m is!
b
no ight s th
r im
cla

A few examples of where Wilson goes wrong...

1 - How (not) to reduce culture to biology

Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities

of sensory perception and mental development that
animate and channel the acquisition of culture.
-Wilson, p. 171
Thus defined, epigenetic rules are too vague to study.
And genes most certainly dont do anything like that.

The one label that has caught on the most,

and which I now vote to be the winner,
is meme, introduced by Richard Dawkins.
-Wilson, p. 148

[Memetics is] completely tautological,

unable to explain why a meme spreads except
by asserting, post facto, that it had qualities
enabling it to spread.
-Jerry Coyne (1999, 2003)

In fact, it is not entirely clear how it is that positing

unseen and undefined entities that infect human minds
by unassessed processes involving the entities own quest
for transmission and that causes people to do things
that transcend their genetic imperatives is
fundamentally different from medieval demonology or,
in any case, qualifies as an empirically grounded
explanation in terms of natural causes.
-Jeffrey Schloss (2009)

2 - The broader project: can we math and logic

be subject to consilience?
Because of its effectiveness in the natural sciences,
mathematics seems to point arrowlike toward
the ultimate goal of objective truth.
-Wilson, p. 69
The dream of objective truth peaked ... with the formulation
of logical positivism... that attempted to define the essence
of scientific statements by means of logic and the
analysis of language.
-Wilson, p. 67

Scientific fact

Logical fact

Mathematical fact

Oh, and here is an artistic fact

>>

How we know that objective truth is unachievable

Its [logical positivisms] failure, or put more generously,

its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the
brain works. That in my opinion is the whole story.
-Wilson, p. 69
A number of philosophers (e.g., Putnam) have shown
why logical positivism was a bad idea, but here
are two major reasons it and similar programs failed:

Humes problem of induction.

Inductive reasoning cannot be justified in
a non-circular way.
Since science (and common sense)
is based on induction...

Godels incompleteness theorems

have doomed Russell, Hilbert, et
al.s search for internal justification
of logic and math.

As for brain science being the answer,

lets get one thing straight...

This is your brain on X tells you which part(s) of the brain

are engaged when you do X. It tells you nothing
whatsoever about the nature, worth or truth of X.

3 - Why human experience isnt about just

facts and logic (hence the value of the humanities...)

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,

and can never pretend to any other office than to serve
and obey them.
`Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of
the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
-D. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Does biology have something to say about,

for instance, art?

Sure, perhaps we can come up with some (largely

untestable) story about why people started painting,
and why they have certain basic aesthetic preferences...

But an adaptive story for these???

s
i
h
.
t
.
.
,
s oo
e
y et
on

Indeed, maybe epigenetic rules can

account for our ability to do this

But whats the adaptive story for this one?

Same for morality:

elementary moral judgment likely evolved
as an adaptation to primate social life...

... But these are not (in a non-trivial sense)

the result of naturally selected genes or epigenes:

Here is one way to make sense of the existence

of different disciplines
(and of why consilience is utopian metaphysics)

True consilience, the seamless integration of all we know from ineffable

aesthetic preference to hard-as-nails physics, may be extremely unlikely. It's not
just that we will suffer quantitative limits on our cognitive powers (we can't
memorize 942,921 digits).
Those brains of ours that Wilson reminds us were shaped in Paleolithic
savannas did not evolve to crack, say, the master problem of consciousness.
And consciousness is only the most obvious such problematic juncture.
A case might even be made that some, though certainly not all, of the borders
between traditional intellectual disciplines represent the natural stress lines
between our domains of cognitive competence. I.e., our inability to think
clearly about some phenomena might underlie our tendency to draw
boundaries where we do: the humanities to one side (telling me how you feel)
and the sciences to the other (telling me that your brain does the feeling).
-Allen Orr, reviewing Wilson

The real reason Wilson favors his consilient scenario isnt because
he finds it more plausible but because he finds it more attractive. For
as he admits near the start of his book, consilience isnt science, it is a
philosophy, a metaphysical view that he obviously finds both
beautiful and deeply satisfying. The irony, of course, is that Wilsons
own science of evolution gives every reason for questioning this
metaphysic, every reason, that is, for doubting whether our brains jury-rigged and riddled with blindspots - are the stuff from which
certain knowledge and seamless consilience can be obtained.
-A. Orr, reviewing Wilson

logic

science

UNDERSTANDING

SCIENTIA
(knowledge)
philosophy

math
SOCIAL
SCIENCES

literature

EXPERIENCE
(humanities)
performing
visual arts
arts
literary
criticism

music