The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

  But, at this crucial point in his entire consilient system, Wilson can offer little beyond a statement of hope, or even faith, that of the choices sanctioned by human mental possibilities, we will select the path supported by our “best” instincts for democracy and toleration—a path that will also provide the maximal probability for prolonged survival (in decency) as a species respectful of its planetary home. And if an essential component of the Romantic perspective lies in granting such a defining power to our deepest emotional realities, equating “truth” with their very existence, then I can only regard Wilson’s ultimate basis for preferences among “natural” drives as an even greater departure from the chain of consilience, and a stronger move toward a basically romantic form of validation: that is, within the natural set, choose the alternatives that exalt our “nobler” propensities, even if a full gamut of other possibilities remains factually accessible within us. But I do not think that “nobility,” in this sense, can possibly claim a factual or scientific definition in any consilient chain:How can the moral instincts be ranked? Which are best subdued and to what degree, which validated by law and symbol? How can precepts be left open to appeal under extraordinary circumstances? In the new understanding can be located the most effective means for reaching consensus. No one can guess the form the agreements will take. The process, however, can be predicted with assurance. It will be democratic, weakening the clash of rival religions and ideologies. History is moving decisively in that direction, and people are by nature too bright and too contentious to abide anything else. And the pace can be confidently predicted: Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

  THE TWO CHIEF FALLACIES OF REDUCTIONISM AND THE ORIGINAL MEANING AND INTENT OF CONSILIENCE

  REASSERTING A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO THE COMMON GOAL OF MAXIMAL UNITY BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

  One might propose two kinds of solutions in principle—each in pursuit of the same worthy goal but one (perhaps) right and the other unworkable—to a common dilemma that may well bear the name of a famous exemplar: the Ugly Duckling. How shall an apparent (and ungainly) misfit win acceptance among its fellows, the common goal of both approaches? We might, if the Ugly Duckling represents the humanities and his fellows the sciences, try to convince the ordinary host that their clumsy brother really belongs to the same stock, and that they have held him in disregard only because they have not classified the differences among their members correctly. They saw the Ugly Duckling as big and awkward because they didn’t realize that their unity forms a consilient chain, with sleek and well-coordinated little ducklings at one end and awkwardly complex cygnets at the other. Each end exhibits great virtues, and neither should be judged better. The sleek end may revel in its status as an ultimate source of explanation for the increasingly complex organization of its constituents up the chain of the full series; but the Ugly Duckling, at the big and clumsy end, may take just as much pride as the most complex configuration, and most difficult to appreciate or understand. But why engage in such silly arguments at all if, as Mr. Pope of my initial story in chapter 1 stated, albeit in poetic metaphor, “all are but parts of one stupendous whole; whose body nature is, and God the soul.”

  This first solution embodies Wilson’s proposal in his volume Consilience. But we also might, in a second solution promulgated in the present book, try to convince the ordinary host that their ungainly ally really belongs to a different “natural kind,” and that his apparent clumsiness only indicates their failure to understand his disparate but equal excellence. In fact, once they invoke their goodwill to sort out the legitimate differences, they will realize the enormous weight of common interests, and recognize two vital powers and pleasures that their new insight about inherent difference can only enhance. First, they can have ever so much fun together, horsing around in the pond and swapping stories, because, after all, swans do share many features with ducks, so the commonalities ensure mutual comprehension while the differences enrich the stories. Second, as the saying goes, “we two form a multitude”—and what a power of influence and respect can emerge from a union rooted in common goals equally backed by different skills contributed toward their realization.

  I do apologize to you, Mr. Andersen, for this ludicrous expropriation, but I also thank you for a direct inspiration, literally rooted in genius loci. For my wavering intention to write this book congealed when I received an invitation to your natal town of Odense to present, as a scientist, the “first annual”—don’t you love the optimism in such a description!—Hans Christian Andersen lecture at your city’s University of Southern Denmark. I chose for my title “The Necessary Role of Story-Telling in the Sciences of Natural History.” Vive la difference, and the potential for fruitful union. (The second part of this previous sentence, come to think of it, is the point of the first, n’est-çe pas?)

  I can summarize my reasons for rejecting Wilson’s solution, while reasserting the case for my alternative, by critiquing both the meaning and applicability of the two key words and concepts that define and embody his analysis: reductionism and consilience. The closing three sections of this part of chapter 9 will present the full case, now only epitomized below:

  1. I believe that reductionism—a powerful method that should be used whenever appropriate, and that has been employed triumphantly throughout the history of modern science—must fail as a generality (both logically and empirically) for two crucial and entirely different reasons, each relevant to a central, but different, aspect of Wilson’s case:

  (i) Within the legitimate magisterium of science, I do not believe that reductionism can come even close to full success as a style of explanation for levels of complexity (including several aspects of evolutionary biology, and then proceeding “upward” in intricacy toward cognitive and social systems of even greater integration and interaction) for two basic reasons that allow these subjects to remain fully within the domain of factual and knowable science, but that require additional styles of explanation for their resolution. I will explicate (on pages 221–232) what can only sound like mumbo-jumbo in this brief statement, but I must at least record these two basic reasons here. First, emergence, or the entry of novel explanatory rules in complex systems, laws arising from “nonlinear” or “nonadditive” interactions among constituent parts that therefore, in principle, cannot be discovered from the properties of parts considered separately (their status in the “basic” sciences that provide the fundamental principles of explanation in classically reductionist models). Second, contingency, or the growing importance of unique historical “accidents” that cannot, in principle, be predicted, but that remain fully accessible to factual explanation after their occurrence. The role of contingency as a component of explanation increases in the same sciences of complexity that also become more and more inaccessible to reductionism for the first reason of emergent principles. A quark may not owe its defining characteristics to accidents of history, but only to lawful rules of natural order; however, the emergence of Homo sapiens as a small population in a certain place at a certain time (Africa within the past 200,000 years), while disobeying no natural law, and while helpfully elucidated by several properties of these laws, cannot be explained meaningfully without emphasizing the formative role of historical contingencies that, in principle, do not flow predictably from laws of nature (even though such contingent events cannot confute these laws either).

  (ii) Beyond the legitimate magisterium of science, and in key fields of the humanities that must be brought into the consilient chain of explanation for Wilson’s model to prevail, the basic inquiries, desiderata, and modes of resolution preclude, logically and in principle, any full or even vaguely satisfactory explanation by the factual methods of empirical science at any level in any reductionistic chain. I do not, of course, deny that factual questions of importance apply to all these fields in the humanities. Surely we may usefully pursue the anthropology of morals as a question of relati
ve frequency among independent cultures, or the psychology of aesthetics in optical terms, for example. We can surely determine that a great majority of human societies have preferred one moral code over another, and we may even be able to devise a satisfactory evolutionary explanation for the decision. But the magisterium of ethics asks a very different primary question, unaddressed (and unaddressable) by such interesting and important factual data: What moral code ought we follow? What ethical duties define a life well lived? How, in a purely logical sense, can the factual anthropology of morals resolve, or even usefully help to adjudicate, such a question? In a hypothetical example previously cited (page 142), if we discover that a majority of human cultures have favored infanticide under certain conditions, and that such a practice arose for good Darwinian reasons, shall we then claim that we have resolved the question of the rightness of such a practice with a “yea”? (I would say, to the contrary, that we have, at most—and such knowledge should be treasured as highly useful—only learned that our job will be more difficult as we try, for moral reasons explicated and validated by modes of reasoning outside factual science, to eliminate this ancient and widespread practice.)

  2. I am delighted that Wilson has rescued, and restored to prominence, one of my favorite obscure words, indeed my longtime leading candidate for a term that should have stuck, but suffered apparent extinction instead—at least until Wilson lit the Phoenix’s pyre. But, although Wilson correctly interprets Whewell’s original application of consilience in the specific domain of scientific knowledge, he also, and in a strikingly ironic manner, then extends “consilience” into a name for a program that directly contradicts the larger worldview of England’s greatest mid-nineteenth-century historian and philosopher of science. Whewell’s own view of distinct magisteria of knowledge coincides with the views supported in this contrary brief, and not with the single reductionistic chain championed by Wilson when he borrowed Whewell’s word for his central premise and book title.

  Of course, terms are as labile and as subject to evolution as organisms, so Wilson may surely propose such an extension from Whewell’s original application to scientific knowledge into a far broader claim for further consolidation by encompassing the traditional subjects and questions of the humanities within the same explanatory structure as well. Still, substantial irony inheres in the peculiar circumstance that an explicit restriction placed by Whewell upon his own term consilience happens to embody the central argument for the primary failure of Wilson’s program.15

  WHEWELL’S RESTRICTED MEANING OF CONSILIENCE, AS PROPERLY USED BY WILSON

  William Whewell (1794–1866) resides among the substantial group of Victorian intellectuals whose interesting lives and deep commitments to learning and new forms of knowledge give them a wider claim upon our memory than conventions for historical fame have granted due to their basically conservative outlook upon the world, or their failure either to make a signal discovery or to attach their name, if only fortuitously, to a memorable concept or an important place (Maxwell’s Demon, or the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, named for a local farmer, not the patriarch). The problem for poor Whewell has even become exacerbated by his apparently unpronounceable name. Why try to resurrect a fellow whose moniker you may botch so badly that the few cognoscenti will guffaw during your paper at the next professional meeting? (In this case try, roughly, “you-ull” or “hew-ull” with sufficiently strong emphasis upon the first syllable, and little more than a gulp upon the second, so that the name almost, but not quite, becomes a single syllable—and you’ll be close, or so my Oxbridge anglophone buddies tell me.)

  Like many conservative Anglican intellectuals, Whewell took theological orders (becoming the Reverend William), but spent his entire career as a university man, in the most proper place of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he first served as professor of mineralogy (1828–1832) and a quite competent scientist who, among other achievements, befriended a student named Charles Darwin. He then, beginning to show his range, became professor of moral philosophy (1838–1855); and subsequently, making an almost inevitable plunge into the administrative world, served as Master—their word for boss—of Trinity College (1841 to his death in 1866) and as vice-chancellor of the entire university for a term in 1842 (also meaning boss, because English universities have titular, usually royal, chancellors who do little [by tradition and expectation] but lend their names and preside at commencements and a few other ceremonies, while vice-chancellors do the actual work of an American college president).

  Most interesting for our discussion here, Whewell made his signal contributions to science despite his strong religious commitments and titles. (I shouldn’t say “despite,” for science and religion, as I have argued many times before, do not persist in battle, and many Anglican clergy, in particular, became distinguished scientists, if only because ecclesiastically sponsored study represented one of the few available paths to extensive education for a man like Whewell, who came from an “ordinary” social background. His father was a joiner—and I mean a woodworker, not a glad-hander.) Whewell began his career as a more conventional empirical scientist, doing respectable work in his initial field of mineralogy. As a footnote to history, Whewell actually coined the term scientist in 1834, interestingly in a review of a book by the most prominent woman writer on science at the time, Mary Somerville, whom Whewell admired. The word science itself enjoyed an ancient pedigree, but in a broader sense to designate any form of knowledge, or scientia in Latin—as in my introductory quote from Dryden on page 12. But, for no clear reason, a general name for practitioners of the enterprise had never emerged, a fact that bothered the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which held its first meeting in York in 1831, followed by Oxford in 1832, and then at Whewell’s digs in Cambridge in 1833, where the issue received extensive airing in Whewell’s presence, leading the noted polymath to do something, ultimately with success, about this odd situation. Thus I should retract part of my previous statement that Whewell’s name disappeared from history for lack of a signal achievement among the motley sources of conventional immortality, from gruesome murder to grand discovery. If any of my colleagues can identify Whewell’s name at all, the reason will probably reside in vague memory of his paternity for the word scientist.

  But perhaps Whewell’s most distinctive and interesting work lay in his groundbreaking efforts in the history and philosophy of science. Others, including such luminaries as Kant and Voltaire, had treated these subjects before, but in a different and far more explicitly didactic and selective manner. (Whewell, of course, maintained theoretical preferences as well, but one senses his distinctive aim to stress documentation over pure exemplification, and at least to attempt fair coverage rather than directly selective advocacy for a definite point of view.) Whewell added extensive and reasonably balanced descriptions of the history of developing scientific notions to more conventional and selective analyses of right and wrong ways to discover the laws of nature and nature’s God. H. Floris Cohen, who holds no special brief of admiration for Whewell, writes in The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 1994): “What turned Whewell into the man who may rightly be considered the ‘father,’ or perhaps more fittingly the ‘grandfather,’ of the historiography of science was his belief that, in order to define in any precise way what these patterns of scientific advance are, one must turn to history.”

  So Whewell, who could never be accused of sloth, published his three-volume, 1,595-page treatise on the History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837, followed three years later by a further two volumes of 1,387 pages, titled The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History. Whewell explicitly focuses, in both immense books, on the empirical sciences that build conclusions, infer general laws, and devise theories by accumulated and repeated observations and experiments with actual phenomena of nature, rather than by posing abstract mathematical models deduced from the first principles.

 
In other words, Whewell wished to understand and analyze the process of induction, or movement from repeated observations to general conclusion—the key and definitive activity of successful modern science, in his view—rather than the stronger emphases upon deduction, or logical inference of nature’s probable order from more-general principles (perhaps only later tested empirically), as favored by premodern students of the material world. He felt that the strength and power of induction had not been adequately documented, even though Bacon himself, from the earliest seventeenth century, had specified induction as the light and way to modernity in science. Thus Whewell decided to write his two great and sequential treatises on the development and progress of inductive studies about the natural world—first treating the history of scientific progress in three great volumes, and then pulling this material together to explicate, in the subsequent philosophical treatise of 1840, the general powers and pitfalls of induction as the hallmark of scientific advance.

  Whewell’s definition of consilience occupies much of chapter 5 (“Characteristics of Scientific Induction”) and 6 (“Of the Logic of Induction”) of the 1840 treatise. He begins by stating that induction can yield general conclusions in two modes, the second more powerful than the first. He names the first of these “colligation of facts,” defined as repeated observation, leading eventually to correct prediction, “of facts of the same kind” (page 230)—as, for example, when we decide that water, unlike most fluids, expands when it freezes, because we have, on twenty occasions, filled a crack in a rock with water, allowed the water to freeze, and then noted each time that the resulting ice both exceeds the original water in volume and also splits the rock in two. Then, just to be sure, we even predicted, and then affirmed, that the same result would occur on the twenty-first and twenty-second occasions as well.