Pondering our collaboration, and wanting to open a second front, while Howard tinkers with his tool. (Howard, anything to report?)
Reading Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). The term was coined in the 19th c., to name the continuing Enlightenment ideal (dating back as well to the first philosopher, Thales of Miletus, in Ionia), of a unification of all knowledge. Wilson notes the same fragmentation in the academy that is our own point of departure, and acknowledges the loss of the Enlightenment belief in progress in knowledge (and in society). He asserts the need to recover this lost momentum and trajectory, and proposes that as hybridizing of disciplines develops, all learning will devolve into two (interdependent) modes: natural sciences and creative arts.
A point of dialogue, to be tested in our electrate context, is a difference or distinction between Wilson and E (the difference made by taking into account the apparatus shift into electracy). Here is Wilson’s summation of the origins and meaning of the term.
“William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis __The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences__, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory, across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “the consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs” (Wilson, 8).
The theory informing our experiment (since I am the theorist!) relocates the site of correlation. The shift does not contradict the spirit of consilience as a term, which, as Wilson notes, is an extension or stronger, more precise sense of “coherence.” Electracy adds to the cycle of inference (abduction deduction induction) a fourth mode — conduction– to describe the kind of coherence found in the arts: a holistic interdependent aesthetic internal organization of a complex heterogeneous collection of materials. “Vortex” is Ezra Pound’s name for this mode of order (anticipating the effect of self-organization in dynamical systems). In the imaging technologies of electracy, the vortex becomes a better candidate for supporting consilience than is similarity or analogy of inductions.
This claim remains to be made precise and tested in our collaboration. To appropriate and revise the original definition of consilience:
“the consilience of Conductions takes place when a signifier, obtained from one disciplinary discourse, coincides with a signifier, obtained from another different disciplinary discourse. This consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs”
A preliminary convergence to scan for coincidental signifiers that may jump together:
WATER as…
figure (media theory)
site (architecture)
number (mathematics, statistics)
code (computer programming)
resource (agriculture engineering)
E
glue
(aka the little red hen)
Tags: consilience
April 14, 2008 at 9:53 pm |
Right, so I’m the token statistician, but perhaps I can represent science or empiricism. Facts are important, it seems, to make progress in understanding the natural world, e.g. water. Progress meaning feeding people, or living well, or fulfillment of some kind.
glue, remlu, ulmer has water as “number” — I’d prefer water as fact. Facts about water. Leads to expressing relationships between facts about water. Leads to inductionregarding facts togeneral principles about water. Etc.
My first post. New to WordPress.
Mike
April 15, 2008 at 8:59 am |
Thanks for introducing “fact,” whose trailing sibling is “value.” The classic fact/value split, while refuted in post-positivist terms, remains valid nonetheless as a way to understand the impasses structuring most policy debates. One of the goals of a new consultancy (the emerAgency) is to open a third position from which to negotiate the aporias of fact-value. More on this rhetorical marvel soon.
glue