A Polytheistic Conception of the Sciences and the Virtues of Deep Variety

“Can we actually ‘know’ the universe? My God, it is hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown” is a line from one of Woody Allen’s books. The line seems appropriate on this occasion, and not only because we are meeting in Manhattan. I think there are many problems with the gospel of “consilience.” I have doubts about its “unification metaphysics” (material determination, all the way down) and its “unified learning” pedagogy (with its emphasis on one particular, even peculiar, “natural science” conception of knowledge).1 And I confess that I am quite dubious of attempts to spread the word of “science” or promote the quest for knowledge in the human sciences under its name. Members of the faith of consilience believe that we are now (for the first time, or finally—or is it once again?) on the threshold of (as T.S. Eliot put it, skeptically summarizing the creed) “rolling the universe up into a ball” (quoted in Converse2). Perhaps that is why I experienced the written version of Professor E.O. Wilson’s keynote address for this gathering on “The Unity of Knowledge: The Convergence of Natural and Human Science” as a kind of “good news” monotheistic sermon. In effect Professor Wilson invited us to return to an old-time state of pre-Kuhnian, preWittgensteinian, pre-Quinean, pre-Rortyean innocence (see Kuhn,3 Quine,4,5 Rorty,6 Wittgenstein7,8). Listening to last night’s homily on the nature of human understanding and intellectual curiosity, one might never have imagined that the Enlightenment idealization of the sufficient conditions for producing knowledge (“an innocent eye” plus a logic machine) has pretty much been dismantled (or at least seriously critiqued) over the past 200 years. One might never have thought to doubt the speaker’s conviction that unification and convergence of belief are the criteria of maturity in scholarly disciplines. Where T.S. Eliot was skeptical, Professor Wilson remains pious. There are other skeptics. Clifford Geertz is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in the interpretation of behavior and who describes his intellectual aim as “ferreting out the singularities of other peoples’ ways-of-life.”9 (p. xi) As a psychological anthropologist and cultural psychologist, I have that as my goal as well. Professor Geertz writes about the field of psychology (which was once known as the science of the soul, is now called the science of the mind, and is scripted to become the science of the body in Professor Wilson’s augury for the future) as fol-