---
title: "Consilience"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:43:26.896070+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Deviations ==
Consilience does not forbid deviations: in fact, since not all experiments are perfect, some deviations from established knowledge are expected. However, when the convergence is strong enough, then new evidence inconsistent with the previous conclusion is not usually enough to outweigh that convergence. Without an equally strong convergence on the new result, the weight of evidence will still favor the established result. This means that the new evidence is most likely to be wrong.
Science denialism (for example, AIDS denialism) is often based on a misunderstanding of this property of consilience. A denier may promote small gaps not yet accounted for by the consilient evidence, or small amounts of evidence contradicting a conclusion without accounting for the pre-existing strength resulting from consilience. More generally, to insist that all evidence converge precisely with no deviations would be naïve falsificationism, equivalent to considering a single contrary result to falsify a theory when another explanation, such as equipment malfunction or misinterpretation of results, is much more likely.

== In history ==
Historical evidence also converges in an analogous way. For example: if five ancient historians, none of whom knew each other, all claim that Julius Caesar seized power in Rome in 49 BCE, this is strong evidence in favor of that event occurring even if each individual historian is only partially reliable. By contrast, if the same historian had made the same claim five times in five different places (and no other types of evidence were available), the claim is much weaker because it originates from a single source. The evidence from the ancient historians could also converge with evidence from other fields, such as archaeology: for example, evidence that many senators fled Rome at the time, that the battles of Caesar's civil war occurred, and so forth.
Consilience has also been discussed in reference to Holocaust denial. 

"We [have now discussed] eighteen proofs all converging on one conclusion...the deniers shift the burden of proof to historians by demanding that each piece of evidence, independently and without corroboration between them, prove the Holocaust. Yet no historian has ever claimed that one piece of evidence proves the Holocaust. We must examine the collective whole."
That is, individually the evidence may underdetermine the conclusion, but together they overdetermine it. A similar way to state this is that to ask for one particular piece of evidence in favor of a conclusion is a flawed question.

== Outside the sciences ==
In addition to the sciences, consilience can be important to the arts, ethics and religion. Both artists and scientists have identified the importance of biology in the process of artistic innovation.

== History of the concept ==
Consilience 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.
Whewell's definition was 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.
More recent descriptions include:

"Where there is a convergence of evidence, where the same explanation is implied, there is increased confidence in the explanation. Where there is divergence, then either the explanation is at fault or one or more of the sources of information is in error or requires reinterpretation."
"Proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry—multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion."

== 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 revived in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the author and biologist E. O. Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the cultural 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 believed that "the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them" with the result that science and the scientific method, from within this fusion, would not only explain the physical phenomenon but also provide moral guidance and be the ultimate source of all truths.
Wilson held that 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. He asserted that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understand 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." An important point made by Wilson is that hereditary human nature and evolution itself profoundly affect the evolution of culture, in essence, a sociobiological concept. Wilson's concept is a much broader notion of consilience than 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 promoted 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.

== See also ==
Appeal to tradition – Logical fallacy in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis of tradition
Appeal to authority – Logical fallacy
Equifinality – Principle in systems theory
Philosophy of science § Coherentism – Branch of philosophy
Scientific method – Interplay between observation, experiment, and theory in science
Syncretism – Combination of beliefs and traditions
Tree of knowledge system – Map of history from Big Bang to present
Unified Science

== Notes ==

== References ==

== External links ==

A conversation with Edward O. Wilson
William Whewell in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy