The Collaborative International Dictionary
Consilience \Con*sil"i*ence\, n. [con- + salire to leap.] Act of concurring; coincidence; concurrence.
The consilience of inductions takes place when one
class of facts coincides with an induction obtained
from another different class.
--Whewell.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context logic English) the concurrence of multiple inductions drawn from different data sets 2 The agreement, co-operation or overlap of academic disciplines.
Wikipedia
In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus.
The principle is based on the unity of knowledge; measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer. For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Great Pyramids of Giza by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick - in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same. For the same reason, different dating methods in geochronology should concur, a result in chemistry should not contradict a result in geology, etc.
The word consilience was originally coined as the phrase "consilience of inductions" by William Whewell ("consilience" refers to a "jumping together" of knowledge). The word comes from Latin com- "together" and -siliens "jumping" (as in resilience).
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson, in which he discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities. Wilson uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.
Consilience is the principle that approaching the same problem by different methods should produce the same result.
Consilience may also refer to:
- Consilience (book), a 1998 book about consilience by E.O. Wilson
- Consilience (journal), a journal of sustainability science
- Consilient, a defunct Canadian technology company
Usage examples of "consilience".
Spencer’s) is, that in ethics, as in all other branches of scientific study, the consilience of the results of both these processes, each corroborating and verifying the other, is requisite to give to any general proposition the kind degree of evidence which constitutes scientific proof.