What does colligation mean?
Colligation is a noun denoting the act of binding or linking things together, most often used in intellectual contexts to describe the unification of separate facts or observations under a single idea, principle, or explanation. The term is especially associated with the nineteenth-century philosopher William Whewell, who argued that scientific progress depends on colligating facts — gathering scattered particulars under a general concept, much as Kepler colligated planetary observations under the laws of motion. Beyond this philosophical sense, colligation can simply mean a connection or joining of elements, whether physical or abstract. The word derives from the Latin ligare, meaning to bind, the same root that gives us ligament and ligature. Formal in register, colligation is rare in everyday conversation but valuable in scholarly writing for expressing precisely the moment when disparate pieces of evidence cohere into a unified understanding.
nounThe act or process of binding, tying, or linking things together; in logic and philosophy, the bringing together of separate facts under a single general concept or law.
- The act of binding or tying things together; a connection or linkage between things.
- In logic and philosophy: the process of bringing a set of individual facts under a general concept or law so they can be understood as a unity.
"The historian's great achievement was the colligation of scattered events into a coherent narrative."
"The essay achieved a remarkable colligation of scientific data with historical context."
"For William Whewell, each scientific discovery involved the colligation of facts under an explanatory concept such as force or energy."
Rarely pluralized; the word almost always appears in the singular, since a given act of unification is treated as one process.
"Different schools of historiography produced distinct colligations of the same archival evidence."
The word 'religion' may come from the same Latin root as colligation — the idea of being bound together.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of colligation
Colligation comes from Latin colligatio, meaning a binding or tying together, formed from the prefix com- ('together') and ligare ('to bind'). It entered English usage around the early seventeenth century as a learned borrowing from Latin. Its cognates include ligament, ligature, and obligation, all descending from the same Latin verb ligare, and it is closely related philosophically through the work of William Whewell, who popularized its epistemological use in the nineteenth century.
Related word forms
How colligation is actually used
Colligation is a formal, somewhat technical word. It appears most often in academic writing on philosophy of science and historiography — particularly in discussions of William Whewell's nineteenth-century account of induction — rather than in everyday speech.
Easily confused with colligation
Collocation refers to words that habitually occur together in language (e.g. 'heavy rain'), whereas colligation means the binding together of facts or concepts into a unified whole.