Questions about wholeness or unity, for example, seem to be best understood as
questions about science qua body of work (or as we like to say, and as the etymology
of “science” suggests, qua “body of knowledge”). But the integrity of science
in this sense should not be understood as requiring that it be complete, that every
possible scientific question have been answered; or that it include no falsehoods,
no supposed “knowledge” that will eventually turn out to be mistaken; or even
that it be unified, or at least unifiable, in the philosophically ambitious sense of the
old “Unity of Science” program, reducible in its entirety to the laws of physics.
What matters, rather, is that, though scientific inquiry is fallible, it is also capable
of correcting earlier mistakes and refining earlier ideas as new information comes
in, new concepts are devised, and new, synthesizing conjectures are articulated;
and that science qua body of knowledge is in an important sense integrated, or at
least integratable — undivided, as the Oxford English Dictionary says.