This book is the result of a workshop held in September 2008, entitled “Integrating Science and the Humanities”. Worrying over the tension between these two fields dates back at least as far as C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (Snow, 1959/1993), a text that is referred to throughout this book. The term “consilience” for the attempt to reconcile them comes from E.O. Wilson, who Buchman et al. quote in chapter 18 as follows:

The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences. Conversely, the material world exposed by the natural sciences is the most important frontier of the social sciences and humanities. The consilience argument can be distilled as follows: The two frontiers are the same. (Wilson, 1998, quoted on p.334)

The book is arranged into two parts, the first dealing with theoretical issues, and the second made up of case studies. The theoretical part is divided into two sections. Section one is Ontologies for the Human, which concerns the question of how we conceive of human beings; mind-body dualism is a major issue here. Section two is Consilience Through the Lens of Anthropology, and concerns the problems and prospects for consilience in anthropology specifically. Anthropology was chosen as an example because it has some scientists and some humanist scholars, so in theory it appears to be an ideal place for consilience. However, the current situation is one where ‘…polite mutual disregard contends with smug mutual dismissal by the discipline’s scientific and humanistic wings.’ (Shore, ch.7, p.140).

The case studies in part two are divided into four sections addressing the following four themes: culture, religion, morality, literature and oral traditions. The book ends with an afterword by the director of the National Humanities Center, Geoffrey Galt Harpham. Harpham suggests that the gap between the humanities and the sciences is not as great as many imagine, and that if it were to be closed, both science and the humanities would be destroyed. He emphasizes the importance of having two different perspectives on the world which can potentially disconfirm one another, as well as stimulating one another’s research. The very last sentence of the book declares that ‘[t]he future lies not with the success of consilience alone, but also with its failure’ (Harpham, p.431)

Harpham’s statement here is a good guide to how this book should be read: with a careful eye to what counts as successful consilience, what counts as unsuccessful, and what we can learn from both cases.

The main tensions for the consilience project are identified as mind-body dualism, reductionism, and the role of “scientific” methods in humanistic work (pp.9-10). A particular problem is the attempt to achieve consilience by a hostile take-over of the humanities by science. Such attempts have made many humanists view the consilience project with suspicion.

The editors identify a “second wave” of consilience which aims to overcome this problem (p.23). In particular, second wave consilience aims to move beyond eliminative reductionism to respect emergent levels of truth (pp.24-28), move beyond the nature-nurture debate to recognize the importance of gene-culture co-evolution (pp.28-30), and move beyond disciplinary chauvinism to recognize that consilience is a two-way street (pp.30-34).

This is an improvement on a simple reductionist picture where higher level entities and processes are always explained in terms of lower. On the second wave picture, explanation can also go in the other direction so that the lower level entities and processes of the sciences can be explained in terms of the higher level entities of the humanities. For example, aspects of culture can explain some of our genetic features (p.30).

While this is better than the simple reductionist picture, the idea of a linear hierarchy of disciplines with physics at the bottom and the humanities at the top remains in place for Slingerland and Collard (e.g. pp.34-35) and many of the other contributors, and this is not uncontentious. At best it seems to be an oversimplification. It is not even clear how the disciplines should be arranged; should psychology sit higher or lower than computer science?

The book does an excellent job of identifying the main tensions and obstacles to consilience, and showcasing the broad range of views available (from Shweder’s ontological dualism and therefore suspicion of consilience in chapter 2, to the reductionist picture). When it comes to the case studies, these tensions are addressed with varying degrees of success. As the editors note in the introduction ‘we wish to emphasize that not all the contributors to the workshop or the volume are likely to agree with the vision [second wave consilience]’ (p.5). In fact some of the case studies could easily be construed as hostile take-overs of humanist research by science.

As long as this is borne in mind, the case studies are a very valuable section of the book. Morin (chapter 9) is a good example of consilience as it should be practiced, because it analyses when human universals from psychology are appropriate for explaining culture, and when they are not. There are places where science can provide useful explanations for the humanities and places where it cannot, and finding out which is which is a very important task for interdisciplinary consilience.

Corbey and Mol’s contribution, giving a Darwinian perspective on Beowulf (chapter 20), seems to me to be a less good example. The authors use the ideas of costly signaling and reciprocal altruism from evolutionary biology to explain the characters’ behavior in the narrative, and therefore certain features of life in the Anglo-Saxon period. It is not clear what an analysis in terms of biology has to add here. If we want to know how the Anglo-Saxons’ lives differed from our own, the relevant features will be cultural, not biological. Evolutionary theory does not seem to answer the question posed by humanist research.

The paper points out the lack of interaction between ethnological hermeneutic accounts of human nature and social behaviour, and Darwinian accounts of the same phenomena. In general, this is a good point, and a potential place for consilience. Why it isn’t appropriate for the task in this case is instructive. Darwinian theory can help to explain general features of human nature, but not specific cases (as Corbey and Mol point out themselves in their conclusion (p.382)!), and not changes in behaviour over a shorter than evolutionary timescale (although it can perhaps place constraints on what changes are possible).

We need to recognize when information from another discipline is helpful and when it is not (see Morin’s contribution cited above). The only way to do this is to get the disciplines communicating and collaborating with one another, and considering metatheoretical issues like the ones highlighted by this book. Inevitably, some collaborations will be more successful than others. That is why a mixed bag of case studies is so valuable. As Harpham points out, the failures of consilience are as important as its successes. Debating why certain cases work better than others is a stimulus for further research.

As long as it is read with a critical eye, this book is extremely useful to scientists and humanists alike. It is important to keep in mind several things whilst reading.  First, what picture is underlying each chapter (a hierarchical arrangement of disciplines mapping a hierarchical world, a dualist picture like Shweder’s, a pluralism where some or all disciplines are on the same explanatory level etc.) and whether this is appropriate. Secondly, whether a particular case is a genuine example of consilience, or a hostile take-over of one discipline by another. And finally whether information from one discipline can genuinely answer the questions asked by another in any particular case, and if not, why not.

The book is written for a mixed audience of scientists and humanists, and as such is widely accessible in style, with technical terms being explained in the text. The wide ranging case studies show it to be an important read, not just for those who consider themselves to be in disciplines “near the boundary” between the humanities and sciences, but for all scientists and humanists. The book well serves the most important function a book of its kind can – to provoke debate among scholars who might not ordinarily communicate with one another.

 

References

Snow, C. P., (1959/1993), The two cultures, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, E. O., (1998), Consilience: The unity of knowledge, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

 

© 2012 Ruth Hibbert

 

Ruth Hibbert is a philosopher based at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Her main research interests are in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. She has a background in Natural Sciences, History and Philosophy of Science, Educational Publishing and Philosophy.