History's Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History
2011 ◽
Vol 42
(2)
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pp. 251-273
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Keyword(s):
Consilience refers to the quality of investigations that draw conclusions from forms of evidence that are epistemologically distinct. The term seems particularly apt for conclusions produced by natural-scientific investigations on the one hand and by historical and archaeological studies on the other. Consilience points to areas of underlying unity of humanistic and scientific investigation— a unity arising from that of reality itself; it represents a convergence in parallel but independent investigations that results in deductions that are much more robust than any investigation would be able to produce on its own.