Consilience Thinking
topic
Consilience thinking — Edward O. Wilson's concept of the 'jumping together' of knowledge across disciplines — is the synthesis practice of seeking the unifying explanatory principles that link apparently independent facts, theories, and findings across different domains, working toward the deepest level of explanation at which all knowledge about a phenomenon converges on the same underlying account regardless of the disciplinary tradition from which it approaches.
Role
Consilience thinking is the most ambitious and the most intellectually rewarding form of knowledge synthesis — aiming not merely for the local connection between two specific domains but for the integrated account that reveals the common deep structure underlying the full diversity of knowledge about a phenomenon. Wilson's consilience program — unifying the social sciences with the biological sciences through the common explanatory foundation of evolutionary theory and neuroscience — exemplifies the ambition of consilient thinking: not interdisciplinary dialogue but genuine unification through the identification of the explanatory principles that operate at every level of organization from the molecular to the cultural.