Introduction: Some Significances of the Two Cultures Debate
Frank JamesInterdisciplinary Science Reviews
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Abstract
The notion of the existence of two opposed cultures, one literary and one scientific, has a long pedigree going back to nineteenth century. However, it was C.P. Snow's formulation of the idea in 1959 and F.R. Leavis's 1962 critique, which brought it to the fore in cultural discourse, where it has more or less remained ever since. The papers in this special double issue of Interdisciplinary Science Review examine the debate and its legacies from a variety of perspectives, while this introduction seeks to contextualise the issues raised and draw some contemporary lessons.
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The Two Cultures: Where are we now?
The FEBS journal, 2018
In 1959 the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow described a schism in Western society. He said that the Sciences and the Arts were, in effect, 'two cultures'. How does that appraisal look to us now? This article looks at a development Snow cannot have anticipated - the current academic orthodoxy of 'Critical Theory', and an associated mistrust of scientific knowledge ….
C.P. Snow's “Two Cultures” fifty years later: An enduring problem with an elusive solution
Technology in Society, 2010
This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.
The "Two Cultures" Revisited
Leonardo / MIT Press, 1996
Postmodernism may be defined as the inability to negotiate the myriad levels of abstraction at play in the aestheticized reality of contemporary life. This epistemological crisis is perhaps nowhere more clearly seen than in the antagonism between literary intellectuals and pioneers of new electronic media—between the culture of the text and the culture of the images, whose modes of knowledge are often taken to be mutually exclusive. If we are ever to make sense of the problems posed by the new media and the opportunities these offer, we must begin to rethink our longstanding equation of meaning with the logic and syntactical structures of language and reevaluate our other ways of knowing the world.
Towards a Third Culture or Working in Between
2004
Practice must always be founded on sound theory.-Leonardo Da Vinci (Kleine, 1977, pp157-158) Artists working with computer and other technologies that are a product of the scientific world are also informed and inspired by the exciting innovations and discoveries taking place in science. We are keenly interested in what the cultural critics and commentators from the humanities have to say on the meaning and impact these discoveries and innovations have on culture and society. Scientists can relate and understand our work easier primarily because we use the same tools-computers. Because our work and tools are in constant flux, we are forced to articulate the reasoning and meaning informing the art produced, which has traditionally been the role of art critics and historians. This creates room for an active dialogue with both humanists and scientists. Thus we are placed in between these "Two Cultures," which creates a triangle and promises to an emergence of a Third Culture. This is a privileged and dangerous position, at least in this transitional stage. Therefore it is important to take a look at the background and current status of these Two Cultures. The Ghost of CP Snow persists Much of the discussion concerning the triangle of art, science, and technology can be traced back to CP Snow's famous annual Rede lecture at Cambridge on May 7th, 1959. The phrase 'Two Cultures' entered into a cultural controversy and debate that has endured remarkably long. The title of Lord Snow's lecture was "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." He identified the two cultures as the literary intellectuals and the natural sciences, and he pointed to the curricula of schools and universities as the source of the problem. In the Introduction to Snow's book, Stephan Collini gives a historical perspective to this divide by locating its beginning in the Romantic Period, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. (Snow, 1964, pg. xii) He traces the British genealogy of 'Two Cultures' anxiety in the linguistic peculiarity by which the term 'science' came to be used in a narrowed sense to refer to just the 'physical' or 'natural' sciences. The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary recognised that this was a fairly recent development, with no example given before the 1860's: "We shall. .. use the word "science" in the sense which the Englishmen so commonly give it; as expressing physical and experimental science, to the exclusion of theological and metaphysical." (Snow, 1964 pg. xi) William Whewell, a philosopher and historian of science who used 'science' in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences of 1840, is credited with establishing this term. The first time it was recorded as an idea, however, was at the Association for the Advanced Science in the early 1830's when it was proposed as an analogy to the term 'artist.' Yet, the two cultures refer to the divide between the literary humanities and frequently exclude what was originally the analogy to science-art.
Too little culture - too much culture: The strange coexistence of two opposite notions of culture
2016
It is a remarkable fact that a wide range of very different notions of culture may be found in academic and political debates. Undoubtedly, this may be explained by the fact that, in itself, the concept of culture is complex (Williams 1983: 87) or even hypercomplex (Fink 1988), and that many particular variants of the notion make use of reduced or simplified versions of it. 1 As long as this takes place with the explicit recognition that such use is simplified for specific purposes, this is unproblematic. More problematic, however, are the many cases where such simplified versions are taken to be exhaustive and sufficient, maybe even identical to the concept of culture as such. Such uses lie behind the fact that very different, competing, even mutually exclusive notions of culture are circulating, causing problems which are not conceptual only. This article critically isolates and compares two such simplified and deficient concepts of culture-they could be called "too much" and "too little" culture, respectively-and finally observes their strange coexistence, sometimes even in the same persons, currents, and conceptions. In the following, I shall introduce the two notions one by one. Current discussions of radicalization are chosen to illustrate different consequences springing from adopting each of the two notions. This also forms the basis for the final discussion of how and why the two notions may sometimeseven if contradictory-coexist. The two conceptions-"too much" and "too little"-spring out of academic currents to which they, to some degree, remain allied-but what interests me here is not so much their current academic state but their function as versunkenes Kulturgut-disseminated culture-in the public sphere and politics. Sometimes, academic notions have the fate of surviving, even in simplified, strengthened versions in public and political discussions, and this is the case, to an eminent degree, with the two versions of the culture concept discussed here.
After the “Two Cultures”: Toward a “(Multi)cultural” Practice of Science Communication
Science Communication, 2003
Two Cultures
I wrote this in 1997. I don't think things are so simple now...
On Cultures and Artscience: Interdisciplinarity and discourses of ‘twos’ and ‘threes’ after Snow’s Two Cultures
At least since C.P. Snow’s seminal Rede lecture The Two Cultures, the idea of a significant difference in kind between the natural sciences and the arts and humanities has been prevalent in Western culture. A gap has been perceived to exist not only in methodology and theory, but more fundamentally, in understandings and worldviews. This has resulted in a dichotomous debate both in academic and media discourses. As a reaction to this, and parallel in time, some actors have strived to achieve a ‘third culture’. This is a common attitude in the still emerging field of ‘artscience’, whose actors seek to combine the advantages and knowledges of the sciences with those of the arts and humanities. Researchers from every concerned field have contributed to the exploration of the interface between ‘art’ and ‘science’. However, I argue in this article that the very term artscience, in simply joining together the words ‘art’ and ’science’, is reenforcing an old notion of a binary opposition between these two fields. The idea of ‘two cultures’, still implied within the image of a ‘third culture’, disguises the plurality of perceptions and approaches within and across fields. While useful in pointing out lack of communication between fields, it tends to overemphasize divisions, ignore complexities, and, in some cases, leave out important parts of the picture. I suggest that the discourse of the ‘third culture’ and the term ‘artscience’ may jointly occlude the multiple possible constellations of practitioners, roles and approaches, and may be a potential limitation to interdisciplinary collaborations.
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Two Cultures Revisited: New Widening Gaps
World Futures, 2002
Aristotle continues to be a highly cited author in cultural sciences (human and social sciences) and humanities. In the last two decades, his work attracted up to hundred times more attention than the work of Konrad Lorenz or Edward O. Wilson, who have attempted to synthesise new knowledge on behaviour and society and proposed alternatives to traditional, intuitively appealing, explanations. Aristotle's interpretations of the world, which appear to be intuitive to human mind, were abandoned in natural sciences upon introduction of the experimental method. Human intuition may have been appropriate in conditions under which it was originally selected: for life of small nonanonymous groups of hunters and gatherers in the savannah. Intuition confines human understanding to a simple reality circumscribed by a boundary that can be called Aristotle's barrier. The barrier may only be crossed by experimentation, which is largely missing in cultural sciences. Snow's concept of two cultures may be revisited to characterise a splitting of natural sciences versus cultural sciences. It may also be applied to a widening gulf between science and technoscience. Diverging of the two cultures may have far-reaching consequences for prospects of humankind's survival.
Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1990
review by Barbara M. Olds, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 45, No. 1/2 (1991), pp. 117-118. Slade, Joseph W., and Judith Yaross Lee. _Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990.
A rickety bridge between the two cultures
Book review of Leon N. Cooper: Science and human experience: Values, culture, and the mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 256pp, $28.99 HB
Ciència i literatura. Ja han acabat les guerres entre les dues cultures?
Mètode Revista de difusió de la investigació, 2014
When C.P. Snow, British chemist and author of eleven novels, coined the phrase «The Two Cultures» as the title for his 1959 Rede Lecture, he was intent on pointing out the defi ciencies of the British education system which, he believed, favoured the humanities, especially the classics, to the detriment of scientifi c subjects. He also insisted that there was alarming ignorance by each group of even the most basic elements of the other disciplines, scientists never having read a Charles Dickens novel and humanities graduates having no understanding of even simple scientifi c terms (Snow, 1959). Despite the widespread debate the lecture evoked, little changed. Most scientists were, by necessity, too immersed in research to read anything other than the journal articles in their immediate discipline, and non-scientists were deterred by the language of specialization in any but popular accounts of recent scientifi c research. However, the rift was much older and deeper than Snow suggested. Having a foot in both disciplines he may have been unaware of the 500-year-old enmity existing between the champions of two kinds of
Two cultures: Essays in honour of David Speiser
Mathematical Intelligencer, 2008
Bridging the Epistemic Gap: C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" as a Compass for the Future of Humanities
Journal of Arts , 2024
In contemporary society, a substantial divide exists between the realms of "Science" and "Humanities." The growing divide has reached a level where reading Shakespearean literature and comprehending the Third law of Thermodynamics are viewed as functions isolated within different cognitive areas leading to an epistemic void, transforming the interaction between a 'Scientist' and a 'Philosopher' into a state of radio silence. This paper intends to study C.P Snow's (1905-1980)-an English novelist and physical chemist-observations in the light of contemporary academic landscapes, as discussed in his essay "The Two Cultures" from the prominent work The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), contending that such a divide remains a critical impediment to the holistic understanding of the world. To get a nuanced understanding of the chosen text, a reading of a few influential works such as The Third Culture (1999) by Gerald Feinberg and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science and Humanism (2018) by Steven Pinker is undertaken. A comprehensive and detailed examination of "The Two Cultures", is conducted to emphasize the barriers between disciplines, specialisation silos, complexities in technological integration, ethical considerations, and the cultural impact of science. The paper proposes a paradigm shift in the discipline of humanities, arguing the necessity for scientific literacy while positing a fundamental reimagining of it, so it stays relevant for the coming generations. Thus, by fostering scientific fluency within the humanities and nurturing mutual respect and engagement, we can forge a richer intellectual ecosystem capable of solving the complex challenges of the 21st century/ age of artificial intelligence.
The Two Cultures" and the Historical Perspective on Science as a Culture
Forum on Public Policy a Journal of the Oxford Round Table, 2007
In the Rede lecture of 1959, C.P.Snow speaks in terms of two cultures, one of science, the other of literary intellectuals. Snow's discussion presupposes that science represents a culture of its own, independent of and superior to the arts and humanities, and unified within itself. At our present distance from this claim, Snow's point of view can be seen as a product of the philosophical orientation to science as an embodiment of universal truths about nature as well as cold war pressures on the West to improve educational standards in science. As the terms in which science is discussed have changed in the last nearly half-century, so has our response to the terms of Snow's "Two Cultures"altered with time. The fields of history and sociology of science have shown the degree to which science is both fully enmeshed in society and conditioned by history, making it more difficult to support the idea of a separate "culture" of science immune from the effects of society and history. That the viability of a culture of science as an independent entity is contested in contemporary academic circles furthermore affects the mode in which students of science and the humanities are inculcated. This paper discusses the historical perspective on science as a culture and considers the impact of changing views about the nature, aims, and methods of science on the teaching of science and its history.
The two cultures and hidden truths: a personal tribute Dr Bill Palmer Associate, Curtin University, Australia
It is a long while since I first read C. P. Snow's controversial book, The two cultures. At that stage of my life, I read anything which Snow wrote, particularly the fictional Strangers and brothers series, where academics and scientists plotted and schemed within institutions to gain positions of power and influence. There appeared to be similarities between the power struggles that Snow described in his books and the real events in the staff room at the school at which I was teaching, which gave personal relevance to his writing. More recently, my academic work centred on the problems involved in the teaching of science at a regional Australian university. The power struggles were still there, but were largely hidden from casual observation, so I have been reflecting lately on issues concerned with science culture, science history and the public understanding of science. One of those issues is whether there are two cultures (science and the arts) vehemently opposed to each other as Snow's essay implies or whether time has mellowed that opposition. This study also describes Snow's life and other issues raised in his essays but I primarily intend this study to be a tribute to a great man.
Two Cultures And Beyond: A Plea For Three Approaches
Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, 2013
Gary Goertz and James Mahoney are masters in presenting methodological messages in an accessible, lucid, and at the same time focused and precise style. Their Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences is another impressive example of this quality. In this book they juxtapose the statistical and the set-theoretical ways of thinking as two distinct and internally "relatively coherent cultures of research" (footnote 2, p. 5). They feel obliged to label these two cultures "quantitative" and "qualitative" because "the qualitative-quantitative distinction is built into nearly everyone's vocabulary in the social sciences, and it serves as a common point of reference for distinguishing different kinds of work" although they admit that those labels "are quite inadequate for capturing the most salient differences between the two traditions" (p. 5). For Goertz and Mahoney, the two cultures differ bas...
Review Of A Tale Of Two Cultures
Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, 2013
Goertz and Mahoney's (GM) A Tale of Two Cultures can be seen as the logical capstone of the debates between quantitative and qualitative methods that was sparked by King, Keohane, and Verba's (KKV) 1994 publication of Designing Social Inquiry. A definitive, though selective, answer to KKV's one logic is put forward, with GM clearly illustrating core foundational differences between quantitative and qualitative "cultures" of research, including approaches to the symmetry/asymmetry of causal relationships, focus on effects-of-causes or causes-of-effects, and set-theory versus statistical correlations and probability theory. As such, the book is a welcome counter to recent monistic pronouncements about research methods within the social sciences, including Gerring's 2011 Social Science Methodology.
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