Abstract

This paper defines in a formal and computational way the notion of ‘consilience’, a term introduced by Whewell in 1847 for the evaluation of scientific theories. Informally, as has been used to date, a model or theory is ‘consilient’ if it is predictive, explanatory and unifies the evide-nce. Centred in a constructive framework, where new terms can be intro-duced, we essay a formalisation of the idea of unification based on the avoidance of ‘sepa-ration’. However, it is soon manifest that this classical approach is vulnerable to the introduction of fantastic concepts to unify disparate sub-theories. Our second approach is constructed by using a detailed evaluation of the relationship between the theory and the evid-ence by means of reinforcement propagation. With the use of reinfor-cement, fantastic concepts can be better detected and the role of con-silience for theory construction and revision can be specialised for dif-ferent inference mechanisms like explanatory induction, abduction, deduc-tion and analogy.