This predictive power is the result of an explanation based on a unity of well-established knowledge (Smith 1994).
Re "From Ants to Ethics: A Biologist Dreams of Unity of Knowledge" (Science Times, May 12): Edward O. Wilson derives confidence for the eventual success of his model of "consilience" of all knowledge, placing physics at its root, by quoting an economist, Paul Samuelson, who said that knowledge advances "funeral by funeral". This confidence is also grounded in physics.
He worked in biogeography, invented the term sociobiology, and in 1998 wrote a book called Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge – which was more or less a theory of everything.
During the 1904 World's Fair in St . Louis the German psychologist and Harvard professor Hugo Munsterberg organized a congress under the title "Unity of Knowledge"; invited speakers were Ostwald, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernest Rutherford, Edward Leamington Nichols, Paul Langevin and Henri Poincaré.
That this is included in a categorization of the objects of zhi (knowledge) underscores the theoretical unity of knowledge and action for the Mohists.
Wilson in 1998 (Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge, New York: Knopf) to describe what he saw as a developing synthesis of science with the humanities, based on principles of natural science.
"The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States Between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review (2011), 211-230.
Wilson has so powerfully described in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Bacon was the grand architect of an enlightenment dream that called for the illumination of the moral and political sciences by the 'torch of analysis.' (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998), p. 23.
Beccaria's rationality, versatility, and insistence on the unity of knowledge were typical of the intellectual life of his time.
In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), he strove to demonstrate the interrelatedness and evolutionary origins of all human thought.
