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Concerning the Unity of Knowledge and the Aim of Scientific Inquiry: a Critique of E.O

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Concerning the Unity of Knowledge and the Aim of Scientific Inquiry: a Critique of E.O Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2014 Concerning the Unity of Knowledge and the Aim of Scientific Inquiry: A Critique of E.O. Wilson's Consilience Worldview Carmen Maria Marcous Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES CONCERNING THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE AIM OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY: A CRITIQUE OF E.O. WILSON’S CONSILIENCE WORLDVIEW By CARMEN MARIA MARCOUS A Thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2014 Carmen Maria Marcous defended this thesis on March 26, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were: Michael Ruse Professor Directing Thesis Piers Rawling Committee Member Fritz Davis Committee Member James Justus Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................1 2. BACKGROUND .....................................................................................................................6 2.1 Philosophical Review: Values in Science ......................................................................6 2.2 Historical Review: Consilience as Cultural Artifact ...................................................11 3. CASE STUDY: HUMAN SOCIAL BEHAVIOR ................................................................17 3.1 The Sociobiology Controversy ....................................................................................17 3.2 Contemporary Human Behavioral Research ...............................................................24 4. PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS ...........................................................................................28 4.1 Arguments ........................................................................................................................28 4.2 Concluding Remarks ........................................................................................................34 REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................38 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................40 iii ABSTRACT In this paper I set out to problematize what the distinguished evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson, has presented to a popular audience as his consilience worldview. Wilson’s consilience worldview is a metaphysical framework that presumes the existence of an underlying unity in the knowledge gleaned from otherwise diverse modes of intellectual inquiry, and details a particular normative approach for its discovery by scientists. After introducing Wilson’s consilience worldview (WCW), I review philosophical and historical literature on the role that values play in scientific inquiry and explain how to understand WCW as a problematic bundle of prescriptive claims concerning the appropriate doing of scientific inquiry. Specifically, I examine deleterious implications for the study of human social behavior that result from attempted application of WCW in order to challenge Wilson’s claim that WCW is the most profitable or promising research program to adopt in the study of human social behavior (what I describe as the ‘The Fertility Objection’). Then, I present an argument for why readers of Consilience should regard its central thesis, WCW, skeptically, as potentially deleterious to the process and aims of science broadly conceived (what I describe as the ‘The Scientific Integrity Objection’). iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION “We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges. Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking domain. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science.” -Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998: 11 In this paper I set out to problematize what the distinguished evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson, has presented to a popular audience as his consilience worldview. Wilson’s consilience worldview (hereafter, WCW) is a particular metaphysical framework that asserts the existence of an underlying unity in the knowledge gleaned from otherwise diverse modes of intellectual inquiry. Among its operating assumptions, WCW relies heavily on the thesis of scientific monism, which states that whenever sub-fields in a particular domain of inquiry, such as the natural sciences, utilize inconsistent background assumptions, methodological approaches, or epistemological claims it represents a temporary phase; and that a complete, comprehensive, and unified account of any given phenomenon should be the ultimate objective and appropriate measure of epistemological (and, therefore, scientific) success. Scientific monism, understood in this way, can be contrasted with moderate views of scientific pluralism; these views hold that either a plurality of questions in the sciences can represent different and non-reducible, though still compatible, approaches, or that pluralism at the theoretical level is commensurable with an 1 integrated account at the phenomenal level (Longino, 2013: 137). Finally, a strong thesis of scientific pluralism, which serves as the most straightforward foil to WCW, asserts that there may be some phenomena or investigative contexts in the sciences where an in-eliminable or incomparable plurality of theories, models, or hypotheses are necessitated by certain investigative contexts (where “incomparable” here denotes that no positive comparative judgment about their value is true). Moreover, proponents of scientific pluralism hold that some such situations are more appropriately understood as instances of scientific success rather than epistemological failure (Longino, 2013: 137). Simply put, consilience is the idea that there is underlying unity in the knowledge gleaned from diverse modes or domains of scientific inquiry, and as such has an intellectual history that precedes WCW. In fact, many scientists would arguably concede that at least some version of the thesis of consilience resides as an unstated, uncontroversial, and dominant background assumption in their thinking. This is partly why it is important to get clear on what is unique, and uniquely problematic, about Wilson’s peculiar version of the thesis. First, Wilson distinguishes his understanding of consilience from the (less controversial) generic value of coherence in scientific inquiry (Wilson, 1998:8). Coherence in science can refer to internal consistency (i.e., a given theory, hypothesis, or claim contains no inherent contradictions) or external consistency (i.e., a given theory, hypothesis, or claim is consistent with accepted theories in other sub-fields of the sciences), or (more usually) both. Next, there is the version of consilience as it was originally formulated by William Whewell in the mid-1800’s. Whewell described consilience as the observation and linking together of facts from different theories and across different disciplines (“an induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an induction, obtained from another different class”) that resulted in a common groundwork of explanation (Wilson, 1998: 8). 2 For Whewell, consilience understood in this manner served as evidence of the truth of the theories from which the convergent inductions occurred (Wilson, 1998: 8). While WCW shares with Whewell’s formulation the understanding of consilience as a means to measure the success of scientific theories, it also diverges from Whewell’s formulation in important respects. Wilson presents his version of consilience not only as a methodological guide in scientific inquiry, but also as a metaphysical worldview to be applied beyond the traditional scope of the scientific inquiry: The only way either to establish or refute consilience is by methods developed in the natural sciences- not, I hasten to add, an effort led by scientists, or frozen in mathematical abstraction, but rather one allegiant to the habits of thought that have worked so well in exploring the material universe. The belief in the possibility of consilience beyond science and across the great branches of learning is not yet science. It is a metaphysical world view, and a minority one at that, shared by only a few scientists and philosophers. It cannot be proved with logic from first principles or grounded in any definitive set of empirical tests, at least not by any yet conceived. Its best support is no more than an extrapolation of the past success of the natural sciences. Its surest test will be its effectiveness in the social sciences and humanities (Wilson, 1998: 9). To be clear, in Consilience (1998), Wilson consistently advocates for WCW as an intentional research program to be applied both in the sciences and across “the great branches of learning,” by which he means to include the arts, humanities, social sciences, ethics, religion, etc. This prescriptive component of the proposal distinguishes
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