the encyclopedic entry of Consilience

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Consilience

Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. The rational view was recovered during the high Middle Ages, separated from theology during the Renaissance and found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment. Then, with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. The converse of consilience in this way is Reductionism.

Modern usage

The word consilience was apparently coined by William Whewell, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840. In this synthesis Whewell explained that, "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."

Modern views understand that each branch of knowledge studies a subset of reality that depends on factors studied in other branches. Atomic physics underlies the workings of chemistry, which studies emergent properties that in turn are the basis of biology. Psychology can no longer be separated from the study of properties emergent from the interaction of neurons and synapses. Sociology, economics, and anthropology are each, in turn, studies of properties emergent from ''the interaction of countless individual humans.

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 scientific realism by philosophers of science.

Edward O. Wilson

Although the concept of consilience in Whewell's sense was widely discussed by philosophers of science, the term was unfamiliar to the broader public until the end of the 20th century, when it was vividly revived in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the humanist biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the culture gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959. Wilson's assertion was that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understanding the details, to lend to all inquirers "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." This is a very different notion of consilience from that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.

A parallel view lies in the term universology, which literally means "the science of the universe." Universology was first advocated for the study of the interconnecting principles and truths of all domains of knowledge by Stephen Pearl Andrews, a 19th century utopian futurist and anarchist.

Election Methods

The word consilience has been adapted to refer to a specific process of checks and balances in election methods that satisfy the following conditions: (1) At least two different ballot tabulation methods shall be relied upon to achieve the official election tally; (2) Each tabulation method employed shall have separate and distinct oversight; (3) Neither tabulation method, nor its oversight and personnel involved, shall communicate with one another during this checking process to prevent cheating; (4) Tallies derived from each ballot method must agree within a margin of discrepancy that would not overturn the outcome of the election; (5) There must be physical paper evidence of the ballots, i.e., at least one of the two methods employed must rely on hand-counted paper ballots or hand-counted voter verified paper trails; (6) At least two of the tabulation methods must occur at the location where the votes are cast, e.g. the precinct, the poll site; and (7) The process shall commence immediately upon the close of polls and preferably shall conclude without severing the chain of custody of the participants conducting the process.

If consilience is not achieved upon the first exercise of the election's checks and balances process described above (i.e., the margin of discrepancy of the ballot tallies do not agree), then an investigation including more tabulation shall immediately ensue.

Commonly, consilience refers to two full hand count tabulation methods if they are achieved by separate and distinct oversight that do not communicate; but, for example, in races surpassing 400,000 ballots cast (to ensure 99% statistical accuracy), it can also mean the concordance of tallies from a 10% sample of paper ballots randomly selected from each and every voting site when compared with the tallies from optiscan-type electronic voting machines.

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development

On February 18, 2008, students at Columbia University launched the inaugural issue of Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development Consilience purports to be a global, online publication dedicated to the promotion of interdisciplinary dialogue on sustainable development.

Consilience (inspired by E.O. Wilson’s book of the same title) has student, professor and practitioner participation and promotes solution-oriented research. Noticeable is its cross-pollination of methodologies between disciplines as evidenced by the inaugural issue's articles exploring issues of physician migration in global health, the role of uncertainty in climate change, and human rights, and biotechnology in healthcare, among others.

Issue One of the journal features thirteen articles, including academic papers, field notes and opinion pieces. Also included is a photo essay displaying events in Afghanistan.

The Consilience launch event was conducted on February 18, 2008 in Low Rotunda on Columbia University's campus with Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, as the keynote speaker.

Consilience is featured on the New York Times blog "Dot Earth", a climate change and sustainability resource written by Andrew C. Revkin.