Consilience
<p>Nov 25, 2008 10:00 PM</p>
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<b>Consilience</b>, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge),</p>
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The word <i>consilience</i> was apparently coined by <a href="/wiki/William_Whewell" title="William Whewell">William Whewell</a>, in <i>The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,</i> 1840. In this synthesis Whewell explained that, "The Consilience of Inductions takes place when<b> an <a href="/wiki/Inductive_reasoning" title="Inductive reasoning">Induction</a>, 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."</b>
Modern views understand that each branch of knowledge studies a subset of reality that depends on factors studied in other branches. <a href="/wiki/Atomic_physics" title="Atomic physics">Atomic physics</a> underlies the workings of <a href="/wiki/Chemistry" title="Chemistry">chemistry</a>, which studies <a href="/wiki/Emergence" title="Emergence">emergent</a> properties that in turn are the basis of <a href="/wiki/Biology" title="Biology">biology</a>. <a href="/wiki/Psychology" title="Psychology">Psychology</a> can no longer be separated from the study of properties emergent from the interaction of <a href="/wiki/Neuron" title="Neuron">neurons</a> and <a href="/wiki/Synapse" title="Synapse" class="mw-redirect">synapses</a>. <a href="/wiki/Sociology" title="Sociology">Sociology</a>, <a href="/wiki/Economics" title="Economics">economics</a>, and <a href="/wiki/Anthropology" title="Anthropology">anthropology</a> are each, in turn, studies of properties emergent from <i>the interaction of countless individual humans.</i>
The fact that all these different areas of research are studying one real, existing universe is an apparent explanation of why generalizations arrived at in one area have often helped in understanding other areas. Consilience is thus often used as an argument for <a href="/wiki/Scientific_realism" title="Scientific realism">scientific realism</a> by philosophers of science.</p>
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