Too little
Leaving the accounts apart
“Here are both reports; readers can connect them.”
The reader receives a collection without an explanation of the relevant relationships.
Integrance
Connect findings without hiding their differences.
Readiness to seek a whole account faithful to its relevant evidence, without selective omission or forced coherence.
Integrance is the disposition to bring related elements into a coherent whole while preserving their differences. In inquiry, it joins findings into an intelligible account: which observations connect, how they bear on each other, and where the connection remains uncertain. The name is an editorial term for this work of thoughtful integration.
Integrance gives an account larger than its separate pieces
Two groups have studied the same question. One measured after a short interval; the other allowed much longer. Their plots look ready to sit on one slide, but the matching colors conceal unlike conditions. You keep the two records visible and build a comparison around the difference. The combined account grows more useful as the graphs become less interchangeable.
Finding the balance in Integrance
A team is combining findings obtained with different methods or observation intervals.
A fitting response
Explaining the relationship
“These results address the same question under different conditions. Here is what we can compare.”
The synthesis makes the shared question and consequential differences intelligible together.
Pursued too far
Manufacturing agreement
“If we average the two curves, the disagreement disappears.”
A smooth combined result can erase distinctions needed to interpret either study.
Integration earns its unity by explaining relationships. Similar-looking figures do not establish that their quantities mean the same thing.
What Integrance makes possible
Integrance lets groups learn from one another without surrendering what their methods reveal. A difference in conditions may explain an apparent conflict or suggest a comparison neither group could identify alone. The larger account gives each contribution a role and shows readers how to examine its connections. Its value lies in the understanding those relationships make possible.
Integrance in ordinary life
A literature discussion
Organize reports around a shared question, carrying differences in population, method or timing into the comparison.
A project meeting
Explain how each person’s finding bears on the team’s question, including a difference that remains unresolved.
Nearby virtues, different work
Discernment
Discernment evaluates the support for a particular inference. Integrance organizes several supported elements into a larger account.
Exactitude
Exactitude protects the particulars that a synthesis might otherwise smooth away.
Integrance and its counterfeits
Counterfeit Integrance: the common-looking scale
Redrawing unlike measurements with matching colors and axes can make them appear directly comparable. A faithful synthesis establishes the basis of comparison before combining values.
How to cultivate Integrance
Name the question the records share.
Identify which differences affect comparison.
Explain the relationship before choosing a single summary.
Try it today
Compare two public accounts of one ordinary question. Write one useful connection and one difference that the combined explanation must preserve.
Questions worth returning to
- Do these similar-looking values describe the same thing?
- What can we understand together that neither report explains alone?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
The difference in the constants employed in those formulae has sometimes a most happy effect in promoting unanimity amongst discordant measures.
Charles Babbage · Reflections on the Decline of Science in England · Chapter V, Section 3
Babbage’s praise is sarcastic: he is describing the manipulation of calculations to manufacture agreement. A joint account needs to explain differing methods, rather than choose a conversion because it makes the curves coincide.
An unverified hypothesis is of little or no value; but if anyone should hereafter be led to make observations by which some such hypothesis could be established, I shall have done good service, as an astonishing number of isolated facts can be thus connected together and rendered intelligible.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · My Several Publications
Darwin discusses his speculative account of inheritance. He locates its hoped-for value in connections that later observation might establish, keeping proposal and verification distinct.
To fix the ideas, let us suppose that my colleague comes to the laboratory of the Royal Institution, repeats there my experiments, and obtains confirmatory results; and that he then goes to University or King's College where, operating with the same infusions, be obtains contradictory results.
John Tyndall · Fragments of Science · Vol. II, XIII. Spontaneous Generation.
Tyndall’s example turns on different air conditions in different laboratories. Combining the results requires those conditions to be examined. The source prints “be obtains” in this sentence; the historical wording is retained.
The same result, obtained from sources so different, leaves not a doubt of its truth.
Mary Somerville · On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences · Section IV.
Somerville emphasizes agreement reached by different astronomical routes. Her strong historical confidence illustrates the value of converging evidence, while the routes still need to remain identifiable.
The bare facts, then, would not be enough for us; and that is why we must have science ordered, or rather organized.
An ordered account shows what observations can tell us together. Poincaré’s distinction helps explain why placing two groups’ plots on a slide does not yet establish their relationship.
… the more different these collected facts are in all other circumstances but that which forms the subject of enquiry, the better; …
John F. W. Herschel · Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy · § 109
Herschel values differences that help a common feature stand out. Combining records is informative when their contrasts remain visible instead of being smoothed into sameness.
Each one of these headings is again enlarged and often transferred before I begin to write in extenso.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1, 1881
Darwin describes repeatedly rearranging the outline of a book. Building a coherent account involves revisiting relationships between parts before treating their order as settled.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.