AIM Framework glossary
Subordinate Consilience
Canonical definition
Subordinate Consilience is the methodological commitment to accept the findings and architectures of neighbouring disciplines as binding priors on one's own theory, without claiming reciprocal authority to constrain those disciplines in return. It is distinguished from Symmetric Consilience by three structural features: (a) asymmetric constraint, flowing into the integrating theory from the neighbours but not outward from the integrating theory to the neighbours; (b) architecture-data conflation, under which the integrating theory accepts not only the empirical data produced by the neighbours but also the architectures those data were originally packaged within, collapsing the Data-Architecture Distinction; and (c) a self-imposed ceiling, under which the integrating theory's architectural imagination is bounded by the architectural commitments of its weakest-accepted neighbour. Subordinate Consilience fails the bidirectionality requirement of the Output-Capacity Entailment Principle (OCEP).
Explanation
Subordinate Consilience is consilience in name only. It sounds like an integration of neighbouring disciplines, but it operates as one-way deference, where the integrating theory imports its neighbours' findings together with their theoretical commitments, and is prevented from exporting corrections in the reverse direction. The result is a theory that cannot reach its own architectural conclusions because its neighbours' architectures are treated as binding priors rather than as candidates for revision. The paradigmatic exhibit is Ryan and Deci's 2017 methodological statement for Self-Determination Theory, which commits SDT to being "informed and constrained by" its neighbours without claiming reciprocal authority to constrain them. The structural geometry encoded in that statement places SDT between its neighbours rather than beside them, and forecloses the architectural corrections SDT's own empirical record would otherwise support.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.