Fodor 1998 LRB - Consilience

7/29/2019 Fodor 1998 LRB - Consilience

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Look!LRB Vol 20, No 21 | cover date 29 October 1998

Jerry Fodor

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson. Little, Brown,

374 pp., 18.99, 21 September, 0 316 64569 9

Suppose God took it into his head to make another world just like ours; if oneis good, why wouldn't two be better? There's a lot he'd have to see to;dividing the light from the dark and the seas from the dry land would hardlymake a start. He'd need to conjure up another Milky Way, for example,that's exactly counterpart to ours, and arrange the very same number ofstars in the very same relative locations. There would have to be the samenumber of planets circling these stars as circle ours; and the same number ofmoons circling the planets . . . and so on down to the least significantparticles of asteroidal debris. All of which he'd have to set moving, at just

the right velocity, away from duplicates of all the other galaxies.

Similarly, on a local scale: he'd need a New Pacific Ocean, with just theright amount of salt in just the right amount of water, to wash the shores of aNew California with just the right amount of smog in the air. Also, item,another tree just like the one that I can see from here, and another me tolook at it. And this new JF would have to have, along with my slightly guiltypassion for Wagner, a worry, just like mine, about whether he'd rememberedto feed the cat and lock the apartment when he left for work this morning.Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for you; and for the tree that you can see fromwherever it is that you are; and likewise for all your friends and relations and

all their trees and cats. So many states of affairs, and they all seem to be sounconnected. First blush, anyhow, the world is a great democracy of facts,each set up in business on its own.

But maybe not. Maybe there are basic facts and, if God settles them,the rest fall into place; he takes care of the pennies, and they take care ofthe pounds. That something of the sort is so, and that the basic factsconcern the physics of things that are very small, seems central to the viewof the world that has been emerging from scientific inquiry for the last fivehundred years. Put the quarks and the protons in their places, along withwhatever else it is that basic physics talks about, and you don't also have to

worry about placing the planets, or the Pacific, or me, or my anxieties.Physics determines chemistry; chemistry determines biology; biologydetermines brain science; and brain science determines my neuroses, myfondness for Wagner and the rest of my mental life. Yours too. All the factsthat there are, including all the facts that there are about minds, 'superveneon' the facts of basic physics. So the story is supposed to go.


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As things stand, it's far from clear that any version of this story willprove to be true. The determination of the facts of psychology by factsabout the brain, in particular, is less a confirmed hypothesis than an articleof faith some scientists share. Still, it's not an irrational faith and there arecases where at least the outlines of a comprehensive physicalistic

reductionism seem to be emerging. For example, it seems increasinglycertain that the laws of heredity supervene on the biochemistry of genes; ifthat is so, it's a remarkable vindication of the general physicalist worldview.Extrapolating from such successes, one might well suppose that some kindof mind/brain supervenience is likewise on the cards. The case for a bottom-up ontology is good enough, even as it stands, to warrant thinking hardabout what it means to us if that turns out to be the sort of world we live in.

The distinguished biologist E.O. Wilson has been thinking hard aboutthis; which is a fine thing. But not to very great effect; which is too bad. Thekey issue is this: if physics fixes all the facts there are, does it follow that all

the explanations that there are are physical explanations? Would thephysicalistic unity of being entail the physicalistic unity of knowledge? Wilsonclearly thinks so. 'I have argued that there is intrinsically only one class ofexplanation. It traverses the scales of space, time and complexity to unitethe disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of aseamless web of cause and effect.'

Consilience is an epistemological thesis: roughly, it says that allknowledge reduces to basic science. This would appear to be very differentfrom the metaphysical thesis that all the facts supervene on the facts ofbasic science. In particular, it is by no means obvious that the

epistemological kind of physicalism follows from the metaphysical kind. Andif it doesn't, then an enthusiast for the second might consistently - evenplausibly - reject the first. Wilson's failure even to notice this possibilitymakes a shambles of his book.

If the case for metaphysical physicalism is induction over its pastsuccesses, the case against consilience is induction over its lack of them. Infact, there are very few examples so far in which it has turned out that theexplanatory apparatus of a higher-level science can be paraphrased in thevocab ulary of some science further down. To be sure, there used to be a lotof interest in a research programme that the Logical Positivists called 'the

unity of science': from astronomy to zoology, all scientific vocabulary was(sooner or later) to be defined in that of basic physics. 'Science is physicsplus abbreviations,' so such Positivists said. But hardly anyone believes thisany more.

Reviving the unity of science programme is most of what consilienceamounts to. Though Wilson is aware that it's now pretty much a dead issueamong philosophers of science, he thinks 'its failure, or put more generously,


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its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. That inmy opinion is the whole story.' If philosophy is your line of work, this willlikely raise your eyebrows, since you probably think (as the Positivists alsodid) that the burden of the unity of science is maybe methodological orontological, but certainly not psychological or neurological. Off-hand, I can't

imagine what kinds of fact about the brain would have saved the Positivistphilosophy of science, and Wilson doesn't say.

Wilson thinks consilience is in disrepute because philosophers don'ttake science seriously. On the contrary, it's in disrepute because they do.It's attending to how the scientific edifice is actually organised that makesthe eventual reduction of the rest of science to physics seem so unlikely.Here, for once, 'don't think, look' sounds like good advice; one could wishthat Wilson had taken it. For what one sees when one looks doesn't at allsuggest a structure that is collapsing into its basement. If the unity of thesciences is true, then there ought to be fewer sciences every day, as basic

physics absorbs them one by one. But what's going on seems to be quitethe reverse: an accelerating proliferation of new disciplines; the damnedthings multiply faster than college deans can keep up with them.

I think one should be moved by this apparent failure of consilience. Ithink it poses a deep, deep question about the way our physicalistic ontologycomports with the pluralism of scientific discourse to which any collegeprospectus bears testimony. I think we ought to pay attention to what thestructure of the scientific institution seems to be trying to tell us. Not soProfessor Wilson. Wilson is in a pique with the structure of the scientificinstitution. 'The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in

philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.'That is a claim to conjure with, and one would like to see some arguments.Wilson says - and this is really all he says that's pertinent - that its 'bestsupport... is no more than an extrapolation of the consistent success of thenatural sciences'. But what the natural sciences have been successful at isnot to Wilson's purpose. They have been remarkably, impressively,gloriously, good at explaining things. But they generally do so in theirproprietary dialects, not in the language of basic physics. The success of thesciences is one thing: the unity of science is quite another.

It is, by the way, characteristic of Wilson's book that he fails to notice

the difference between what one might call vertical and horizontalconsilience. Cases of the former (the molecular theory of heat; the physicaltheory of the chemical bond) provide the paradigms for the unificationprogramme. Far more frequent, however, is the joining forces of scientificdisciplines at more or less the same explanatory level; and in these cases, noreduction need be achieved or intended. Rather, conjoining theexperimental and theoretical armamentarium of several sciences allowsexplanations and systematisations of phenomena that none of them is able


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to handle on its own. This really is a robust tactic of scientific investigation:it's what spawns the host of 'hyphenated' disciplines that have becomeincreasingly familiar, especially in the biological and social sciences -physical anthropology; developmental psycholinguistics; acoustic phonetics;palaeobiology, evolutionary psychology and so on. The point to notice is that

when this sort of thing happens, you end up with more sciences than youstarted with, not fewer: developmental psychology and linguistics anddevelopmental psycholinguistics, as the case might be. The web of causalexplanation is extended; but sideways, not up and down.

Ironically, the best and most striking example of the failure of sciencesto unify vertically, in spite of heroic efforts and massive expenditure, isexactly the one that Wilson has bet the most on: the reduction of psychologyto neurology. To hear Wilson describe it, the real breakthrough inunderstanding the mind is 'cognitive neuroscience', the attempt to model theneurological mechanisms of intelligence. Now, it is possible for people who

are sensible and well informed to disagree about how much has been foundout about the way the brain implements the cognitive mind. My view of thematter is, I admit, extreme: namely, that the progress has been negligible tonil. Suffice it to say, on the one hand, that the examples Wilson has on offerare pretty thin ('disturbance of particular circuits of the human brain oftenproduces bizarre results'); and, on the other, that the most importantadvances in 20th-century psychology are arguably Turing's proposal for acomputational theory of thought and Chomsky's discovery of themathematical structure of language. Neither of these emerged from, or wasso much as influenced by, neurological investigations. And neither ismentioned by Wilson.

In fact, Wilson appears to have swallowed whole the depressingcombination of recidivist Associationism with engineering jargon that ischaracteristic of much of the recent brain science literature: memory

re-creates not just moving images and sound but meaning [sic] in theform of linked concepts simultaneously experienced. Fire is connectedto hot, red, dangerous, cooked, the passion of sex, and the creativeact, and on out through multitudinous hypertext pathways selected bycontext, sometimes building new associations in memory for futurerecall. The concepts are the nodes or reference points in long-term

memory... Recall with images from the long-term banks with little orno linkage is just memory. Recall with linkages, and especially whentinged by the resonance of emotional circuits, is remembrance.

The psychology endorsed here is no advance on Hume or Mill, and theexposition is markedly less sophisticated. The talk about nodes, linkages,long-term banks and resonating circuits is entirely meretricious and addsnothing but the show of connections with the computational sciences (which,


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by the way, Wilson appears to have misunderstood; the kinds of model thatmake play with nodes and linkages and such generally deny that there arealso 'long-term banks' and such). If this is what consilience is like, Irecommend the assorted antipasti. It is actually worse still with Wilson'sbook than I have been suggesting. He has ambitions that the Positivists

didn't dream of, and consilience's writ runs not just to the relation betweenthe special sciences and physics, but also to 'art, ethics and religion'. Ihasten past this part because I don't understand how it's supposed to work.It is, after all, entirely possible to doubt that 'art, ethics and religion' areprimarily in the business of explaining things: not, anyhow, in anything likethe way that geology and biology and physics seek to do. In which case, it'shard to see how the putative unity of scientific explanations could be amodel for consilience between science and 'the humanities'. Wilson himselfappears vaguely aware that there may be trouble here, and he's not veryclear about what the programme comes to. 'Neither science nor the arts canbe complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the

intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the freshblood of science.' So characterised, the idea seems a bit generic, and onedoes wonder what on earth 'completing' the arts would be like.

Sometimes what Wilson wants to unify is science and art criticism.Sometimes consilience consists in science illuminating the origin of art (or ofethics). Sometimes the idea is that science will tell us what human nature is,so that ethics, psychology and economics can be rendered 'compatible'.Sometimes, rather touchingly, Wilson wants consilience to provide an'ultimate purpose to intellect . . . Order, not chaos . . . beyond thehorizon.' I suspect what Wilson wants from unifying science with the

humanities is the prospect of some sort of happy ending. When he's in thismood, his sense of things is much closer to the Baptism he tells us he wasraised in than to the 'Ionian' worldview that he tells us he admires. That thenews about the human condition might turn out to be simply awful is not apossibility that he appears prepared to contemplate.

Actually, he seems to have a tin ear for this sort of stuff; what he saysabout art, religion and ethics is often embarrassing. Wilson on Kant: Kant'sethics

has a comforting feel to it, but it makes no sense at all in terms of

either material or imaginable entities, which is why Kant, even apartfrom his tortured prose, is so hard to understand. Sometimes aconcept is baffling not because it is profound but because it's wrong. Itdoes not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brainworks.

Wilson on art and edification: 'Works of art that prove enduring are intenselyhuman istic.' Wilson on Goethe: 'In the philosophers' empyrean, I imagine


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Bacon has long since lectured Goethe on the idols of the mind. Newton willhave lost patience immediately.' Still, 'Goethe can be easily forgiven. Afterall, he had a noble purpose.' I'm so glad, because I do rather like some of hispoems.

Science is the characteristic product of our culture. Similarly,understanding where science fits in - metaphysically, epistemologically,morally, aesthetically and otherwise - is our characteristic philosophicalproblem; we've been working on it since Descartes. As of now, the hardestpart is to reconcile a physicalistic ontology with the apparently ineliminablemultiplicity of discourses that we require when we try to say how things are.Wilson thinks this appearance of tension is unreal. He suspects that if weresist consilience, that's because we're suffering from pluralism, nihilism,solipsism, relativism, idealism, deconstructionism and other symptoms of theFrench disease. Well, maybe, but I for one plead not guilty. It seems to methat scientific Realism is quite compatible with the view that events fall into

revealing and reliable patterns not just at the level of micro structure but atmany different orders of aggregation of matter. The heterogeneity of ourdiscourse would then correspond to the heterogeneity of levels at which theworld is organised, and both might well prove irreducible.

Everything is physical perhaps, but surely there are many differentkinds of physical things. Some are protons; some are constellations; someare trees or cats; and some are butchers, bakers or candlesticks. For eachkind of thing, there are the proprietary generalisations by which it issubsumed, and in terms of which its behaviour is to be explained. For eachsuch generalisation, there is the proprietary vocabulary that is required in

order for our discourse to express it. Nothing can happen except what thelaws of physics permit, of course; but much goes on that the laws of physicsdo not talk about. It would not be entirely surprising if the explanatoryapparatus that our higher-level theories require in order to say the sorts ofthing that physics doesn't, cross-classifies the taxonomy that physicalexplanation employs. Maybe this kind of picture is a viable alternative toconsilience. Or maybe it's not. Or maybe both are wrong. Or maybe it's stilltoo soon to tell.

Jerry Fodor, who teaches at Rutgers and at the CUNY Graduate Center, is theauthor of In Critical Condition and of Concepts: Where Cognitive ScienceWent Wrong, both published this year.

Fodor 1998 LRB - Consilience

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