"Unified Science" can refer to any of three related strands in contemporary thought.
Belief in the
unity of science was a central tenet of
logical positivism. Different logical positivists construed this doctrine in several different ways, e.g. as a
reductionist thesis, that the objects investigated by the
special sciences reduce to the objects of a common, putatively more basic domain of science, usually thought to be physics; as the thesis that all of the theories and results of the various sciences can or ought to be expressed in a common language or "universal slang"; or as the thesis that all the special sciences share a common
method.
The writings of
Edward Haskell and a few associates, seeking to rework science into a single discipline employing a common artificial language. This work culminated in the 1972 publication of Full Circle: The Moral Force of Unified Science. The vast part of the work of Haskell and his contemporaries remains unpublished, however. Timothy Wilken and
Anthony Judge have recently revived and extended the insights of Haskell and his coworkers.
Unified Science has been a consistent thread since the 1940s in
Howard T. Odum's
systems ecology and the associated
Emergy Synthesis, modeling the "
ecosystem": the geochemical, biochemical, and thermodynamic processes of the
lithosphere and
biosphere. Modeling such earthly processes in this manner requires a science uniting geology, physics, biology, and chemistry (H.T.Odum 1995). With this in mind, Odum developed a
common language of science based on electronic schematics, with applications to ecology economic systems in mind (H.T.Odum 1994).
See also
Consilience — the unification of knowledge, e.g. science and the humanities
Odum, H.T. 1994. Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology. Colorado University Press, Colorado.
Odum, H.T. 1995. 'Energy Systems and the Unification of Science', in Hall, C.S. (ed.) Maximum Power: The Ideas and Applications of H.T. Odum. Colorado University Press, Colorado: 365-372.
External links
Future Positive Timothy Wilken's website, including a lot of material and diagrams on Edward Haskell's Unified Science