Triangulating the Two Cultures Entanglement: The Sciences and the Humanities in the Public Sphere

Abstract

The Sciences, the Humanities, and the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” For quite a long time now, we have lived with the two cultures divide. A “gulf of mutual incomprehension”, wrote C.P. Snow, is dividing “literary intellectuals” from scientists, and creating an inability to communicate, a mutual inability to understand and appreciate each other (3-4). Scholars are not quite in agreement about how long this has been going on but there is widespread consensus on the disadvantages of the situation, coupled with suggestions for how to overcome it or a resigned acceptance of its unwelcome persistence (Gould, Cordle, Waugh). In exploring the range of perspectives open to the ScienceHumanities, it is worth considering to what extent this focus on the mutual perceptions and reinterpretations of the humanities and the sciences, and the disciplinary anxieties which may inform them, has itself a limiting effect on our analysis. If, half a century after Snow, the two cultures debate is still “an obligatory but uninspiring inclusion” (Sleigh 3) in scholarship on literature and science, it may be because this concentration on a two-way relationship fosters the tendency of the debate to lock itself into familiar channels. Our purpose here is to guide the discussion about the relationship between the sciences and the humanities away from the question of their mutual perception in order to see how that relationship may look different once we shift the focus towards how the sciences and humanities are perceived from additional angles of observation. We aim for a reorientation that proceeds from a discussion of the attitudes of the public sphere to both the sciences and the humanities. We illustrate this by analysing novelistic representations of scientific concepts and practices, as well as the varied and sometimes controversial responses of general, literary and scientific readers to these. Our goal is not to undertake a redescription of the other discipline in terms of our own, but to make visible – and thereby available for public understanding and public discussion – the underlying structures of mediated communication about science.