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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does local positivism fail to distinguish between, in Wilson's narration?

2. Where did Wilson develop the idea of unified learning?

3. What field does Wilson say philosophers and scientists should collaborate in?

4. What is consilience?

5. How much does the human brain weigh on average?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the modern understanding of dreams?

2. What is the relationship between complexity theory and consilience?

3. How would you describe Rousseau's influence on Wilson's idea of consilience?

4. What is the modern understanding of how the brain works?

5. How does the modern theory of dreams explain something like the presence and significance of snakes in dreams, in Wilson's account?

6. How is knowledge accepted as settled, or final?

7. How do anatomical limitations affect our science, in Wilson's account?

8. Why does Wilson cite Einstein as an example of someone who practiced consilience?

9. What ancient sources does Wilson trace consilience back to?

10. How has postmodernism affected Wilson's consilience?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Wilson writes that economic models of culture can change variables, but keep the remainder--the unique thing that is the culture itself--constant. What is it about economic that Wilson says makes it better suited to our times than sociology and anthropology? What would superiority mean if Wilson were the dean of a university, with power to determine funding for departments?

Essay Topic 2

Are 'epi-genetic rules' really just another way of saying complex social factors that have to be experienced individually? Does Wilson really evade the complexity and individuality of experience and sensation and language use?

Essay Topic 3

Part of Wilson's argument about the value of science is the technology that science has required for its own purposes, or produced for consumers, but applied science seems to be different than the pure science Wilson is talking about throughout 'Consilience', especially when the perpetual drive to innovate in business has required the policy of planned obsolescence, where everything technological is designed to be superseded by new products in the future. Does this present a problem for consilience, or is this beyond the scope of Wilson's argument? How do science's industrial uses, which seem to tend toward dispersion, relate with the possibility of science's unification?

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