Consilience as Method: The Transitive Analysis and the Completion of Whewell's Program

摘要

In 1840, William Whewell identified the most powerful criterion of scientific validation available: consilience of inductions — the convergence of independent lines of evidence from distinct disciplines toward the same conclusion without coordination. Whewell demonstrated that this criterion produced knowledge of a qualitatively superior order to validation within a single discipline. What he could not construct was a method for producing consilience deliberately. For 185 years, consilience remained a phenomenon recognized retrospectively — never generated by protocol. This paper introduces the Transitive Analysis of Accumulated Human Experience as the first systematic operationalization of consilience as an executable scientific method. The Transitive Analysis was developed independently, without prior study of Whewell's work or the consilience literature. The convergence identified retrospectively between these two frameworks constitutes in itself a live instance of the consilience principle — two independent developments arriving at the same structural point without coordination. This is precisely the signal Whewell identified as the strongest available evidence of truth. The full protocol of the Transitive Analysis is protected intellectual property and is not disclosed in this document. What is established here is its epistemological character, its relationship to Whewell's program, its categorical distinction from statistical simulation, and the architectural consequences that follow from its application with logical necessity. These architectural consequences — including the genesis of conscious social robotics, the categorical leap beyond agentic artificial intelligence, and the ontological resolution of the alignment problem — are introduced here and developed in full in the prior publications: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18662542 | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18839718 | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18943498