The expression consilience of evidence is described as a rather quizzical terminology officially used to define scientific concensus. It's interesting that my automatic spelling feature chooses to spell the word as co silence. It could be useful to compare these two words. Consilience versus cosilence.
The Latin origin prefix con is a variant of com preceding all consonants (another con) excluding b,h, l, p, r all found added to the fronts of nouns at dictionary.com Examples are such as convene, condone and connection with con originating from com as in .com
Consilience of converging and widely sourced conclusions which agree with each other depend upon reliable evidence within and across disciplines. The credit goes to a polymath British scientist named William Whewell to gather and collate streams of data from collocations but somewhat dissimilar categories of science to form a nomenclature based not upon necessary truths but upon evidence. For example, he constructed a form of measurable scale across many early evolving categories of science.
Instead of saying the scale was fixed and never changing, his approach to evidence gathering would measure the notes of apparent points of evidence and mark them rather than a result to a precomposed conclusion. Similarly as his interests jumped together across many disciplines his wordsmithery skills included creating new words to explain the convergences or consiliencies between experiments, their results and across disciplines. His credits include the word scientist.
However the origins and meaning of science and how it requires consiliencies has been lost to many disciplines such as economic geologists and meteorologists which appears surprising. If large portions of these disciplines discredit a concensus of global warming might they not be demonstrating examples of cosilence? Have magnified minorities of these disciplines lost an understanding of consilience? Or were their disagreements based upon power versus rational based decisions? Is there a consilient cosilence between many of these researchers as their primary employers are fossil fuel and other mineral extraction companies along with the mainstream media?
Measurements in consiliencies might be collected across various methods with low error probability and the greater the number of unrelated measurements reduces the probable number of errors. As E.O.Wilson resurrected the word consilience to explain a fragmentation of the historic polymath's general approach to a unity of knowledge, he rescued it from the depths of a power based cosilence found deep in the earth and high in the sky of a collective human science.
There is a similar fragmentation taking place in the world's biological ecosystems and the interconnectedness essential to support life and required of increased awareness not only of consilience. This might be defined as an increasing incidence of cosilence? Disciplines originally formed to construct an orderly category of knowledge research have increasingly lost an awareness of convergence or the benefits of consilience. It seems economic geologists and meteorologists might be the most likely not to observe or report on the impacts of weather and resource extraction on rapid destruction of human and wildlife habitats which are convergent with increasing fossil fuel emissions.
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