AIM Framework glossary
Symmetric Consilience
Canonical definition
Symmetric Consilience is the methodological commitment to accept the empirical findings of neighbouring disciplines while treating their architectures as themselves subject to revision in light of the integrating theory's own findings. It is distinguished from Subordinate Consilience by three structural features: (a) bidirectional constraint, under which the integrating theory imports constraints from its neighbours and exports corrections to them, with both directions legitimate; (b) architecture-data separation, preserving the Data-Architecture Distinction by treating empirical findings and theoretical architectures as separable objects; and (c) an open ceiling, under which the integrating theory's architectural imagination is bounded only by its own internal coherence and by the empirical record as a whole, not by any single neighbour's architectural commitments. Symmetric Consilience satisfies the bidirectionality requirement of the Output-Capacity Entailment Principle (OCEP). The Mutual Architectural Correction Principle is the universal form of Symmetric Consilience applied uniformly across the human behavioural sciences.
Explanation
Symmetric Consilience is what the word consilience should mean if the word is to do useful work. It is the commitment that an integrating theory and each of its neighbours operate on the same terms: each accepts what the others have found, each reserves the right to question the architectures built around those findings, and each accepts the same treatment in return. Under Symmetric Consilience, the integrating theory is not foundational, not dependent, and not nested. It stands beside its neighbours and is entitled to propose architectural corrections to them on the same basis its neighbours are entitled to propose architectural corrections to it. The AIM Framework is committed to Symmetric Consilience and to the Mutual Architectural Correction Principle that operationalises it, and the discipline-specific reassessments set out in the Consilience Frame (Chapter 5, Appendix 5C) should be read as applications of this commitment.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle.