The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox (2003) is Stephen Jay Gould's posthumous volume exploring the historically complex relationship between the sciences and the humanities in a scholarly discourse.
In each case the strategy for either side has been to portray centrist members of the opposing camp with radical minority views of extremist straw men so as to easily defeat these misrepresentations of otherwise rational mainstream arguments.
He stresses the dangers of presenting cut and dried dichotomies, such as good vs. bad or spirit vs. matter, or focusing on polar positions within continuous ranges of actions, methods, discourse and beliefs.
Leaders of the Scientific Revolution, being the new kids on the block with respect to the established scholastics, were forced to emphasize the value of their enterprise in order to receive resources or merit for their investigations.
He also cites theologian Reverend Thomas Burnet, whose 1680 Sacred Theory of the Earth[1] argued that God created a clockwork world with physical laws that did not require miracles or tampering with.
Gould cites John Ray's preface in 1678 to The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, which stated that their scientific treatise did not pay undue attention to literary style and utilized methods of direct observation and validation of factual accuracy, in contrast to Renaissance compendia.
This, he believes is detrimental to the working professional scientist, who would benefit from constructive criticism and insightful analysis originating outside of the sciences, and from gaining a historical perspective of their profession.
He also argued that most social critics and historians of science that he was aware of were not pure relativists, and agreed that there is an external reality that may be scientifically modeled with associated benefits of acquired knowledge and applications.
Gould includes an analysis of E. O. Wilson's book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge within the larger scope of his recommendations for a confederation of the physical sciences and humanities.
Gould reproves Wilson's program of reductionism by utilizing two main arguments based upon the emergence and contingency or randomness found in some complex, nonlinear or non-additive systems.
He highlights evolution by natural selection as a primary example of how entities such as ourselves are not a necessary, but rather a contingent product, "we have preferred to think of Homo sapiens not only as something special (which I surely do not deny), but also as something ordained, necessary, or at the very least, predictable from some form of general process...
He shows Whewell's consilience to be a literal "jumping together" in the mind of diverse facts or phenomenon initially appearing as unrelated and that such simplification and unification under the higher generality of only one theory merits the classification as probable truth and deserves further investigation and testing.