Consilience and the Status of Human-Level Truth
Edward G. Slingerland
Summary

One of the primary barriers to humanities / natural science dialogue is the intuition that integrating human-level truths into a scientific framework is somehow inappropriately “reductionistic.” This paper argues that this intuition is based upon a mind-body dualism that is an inextricable part of innate human cognitive endowment. Pursuing “consilience” between the natural sciences and humanities thus requires the cultivation of a dual consciousness, where we acknowledge our inability to escape the lived reality of human-level concepts, while simultaneously seeing them as physical processes amenable to natural scientific explanation.