Consilience

A term popularized by the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson¹ but apparently first coined by William Whewel in his studies on the history of science, consilience has come to describe the way in which different academic disciplines or scientific disciplines interrelate and may interoperate.  Truths or discoveries in one discipline may bear upon the pursuits of other disciplines simply because all scientific pursuit examines the same base reality; or, insofar as particular disciplines may be thought of as unique and separate systems of scientific pursuit devoted to studying particular systems within the natural world, they are nonetheless subsystems of the larger system which we would call reality and are studying particular subsystems of the larger system we would call the world, nature, or the universe.  To the degree that any scientific discipline discovers truths concerning the particular system it studies, those truths could be said to describe aspects of the larger system and thus may bear upon the scientific pursuits of other disciplines.

Mark Safranski of the blog Zenpundit has related this idea of consilience to the idea of resilience, suggesting that high levels of consilience between the nodes or persons and structures of an organization may enable a higher degree of resilience.²

See: Consilient Effects, Resilience

¹Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge  @ Amazon.com.

²Beyond Resilience: The Power of Consilience in Networks @ Zenpundit.com.