In 1959, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow held his famous Rede lecture on "The Two Cultures" (Snow 1961[1959]), juxtaposing the intellectual cultures of science on the one hand and of the humanities and arts (or, more precisely, the literary field) on the other hand. The message Snow linked to his diagnosis, namely that literary intellectuals "controlled the heights of power", while "only the scientists possessed the knowledge and vision necessary to confront the problems of the modern world" (Ortolano 2003, 606) met with instant critique (known as the Snow-Leavis controversy). … [please read below the rest of the article].
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Image credit: Routledge
Article Citation:
Kastenhofer, Karen. 2024. "The Two Cultures of Interdisciplinarity." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 13 (2): 32–36. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-8z3.
The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers.
Jan C. Schmidt
Routledge, 2021
206 pp.
Criticism of the Two Cultures Approach
The two cultures diagnosis itself has later also been criticized prominently and repeatedly within the emerging field of science studies, especially its sub-branch of research into epistemic cultures. Tony Becher (2001[1989]) saw stronger similarities between some sub-disciplines of different faculties than between sub-disciplines sharing the same disciplinary and faculty affiliation and criticized Snow’s ‘two cultures’ as profoundly irritating, as there were "many more numerous and more subtle boundaries than Snow’s polemic allowed within the world of scholarly enquiry, and many bridges across what he chose to depict as a grand canyon of the intellect" (ix).
While Snow’s predicament that the sciences harboured unequalled epistemic authority has since been challenged by the emerging field of science studies (Cohen 2001), three other predicaments—Snow’s more-than-one-culture diagnosis, his acknowledgment of persistent mutual incomprehension as well as his valuation of one culture over the other—seem to have survived all criticism over the past decades: for too many of us, the two (or three) cultures ontology and the accompanying trans-cultural incomprehension keep being a felt and experienced reality in our everyday scholarly life-worlds (Goertz and Mahoney 2012, for instance, apply the two cultures scheme to two methodological paradigms in social science).
Karin Knorr Cetina (1999), also an adversary of Snow’s fundamental demarcation of the sciences’ culture from the culture of the humanities and arts, provided herself a comparative reconstruction of two epistemic cultures, namely molecular biology and particle physics. Albeit following a decidedly symmetric approach, she outlined in detail how epistemic cultures can differ and thus showed that we should, in fact, speak of scientific or epistemic cultures in the plural. Additionally, and running counter to Knorr Cetina and other sociologists’ of science ‘symmetric programme’, in too many situations the acknowledgement of a cultural divide is being linked to a preference of one scientific culture over another.
The Science Wars
Snow’s (1961[1959]) juxtaposition of "the two cultures" can thus also be linked to a phenomenon of the 1990s, the so-called "science wars", as another fierce battle between scientists and humanities’ scholars over epistemic legitimacy and authority. This battle has once again been initiated by scientists, this time in reaction to the sociology of sciences’ growing challenge of the sciences’ singular epistemic authority and societal role. However, as Benjamin Cohen (2001) argues, these ‘wars’ differed in one respect from the earlier Snow-Leavis controversy: "Snow and Leavis argued from opposite sides of one position, of which domain of knowledge was better suited to guide the future of society." The "science worriers argue[d] two different positions. The science defenders argue[d] for the acknowledgement of the divide" and the superiority of science, "[t]he science studiers argue[d] that their research ha[d] redefined the enterprise of science such that a divide between science and humanities has no epistemological basis", not playing the authority of one off against the other (Cohen 2001, 11, my emphasis). Whether the ‘science defenders’ shared this latter appraisal warrants at least some scrutiny. Steve Fuller (1995) e.g. rather speaks of "a dominant ideology on the defensive" (cp. also Labinger and Collins 2001).
To better understand both, the Snow-Leavis controversy and the 1990s’ ‘science wars’, historians of science have also alluded to their respective political dimensions. The former debate has been linked to the Cold War and a concomitant demand to facilitate communication "through the ideological neutral domain of an international scientific community", while feeding the need for Western supremacy (Cohen 2001, 8); the latter as an assault on the ‘academic left’ (10) or on the "objectionable members of the academic left" who did not belief in the "naturally self-correcting character of scientific inquiry" and saw "contemporary natural science as a deeply politicized practice that work[ed] mostly against the interests of progressive causes" (Fuller 1995, 116). In this respect, scholars have clearly addressed the more-than-epistemic aspects of academic communities and cultures. Such aspects would also clearly figure in later expert controversies on the regulation of emerging technologies from nuclear power to biotechnology and technologies or socio-technical infrastructures of the digital, albeit triggering less explicit denomination in the less tangible geopolitical regime of a post-Cold War world.
Thirty years later, clearly much has changed. Not only has the former left-right political ontology become manifestly inadequate, the academic profession is now viewed all the more as a strategic actor field, aiming at the production of ever new knowledge that will, eventually, contribute to society’s prosperity and a nation’s economic competitiveness (or, to society’s demise, injustice, inequality, extraction and exploitation); and scientific authority rests not alone on the sciences’ epistemological authority, but also on a their (assumed) societal impact in its own right. In all this, interdisciplinarity is being advertised as one major success factor.
Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity
Since its initial introduction as a countermovement in academia and as a means of emancipation from dysfunctional ‘disciplinary silos’ and academic ivory towers, interdisciplinarity has also reached the scientific mainstream in Western innovation regimes. With the respective disciplinary de-differentiation of science, the two-culture thesis seems to have lost its very basis. But, yet again, we are confronted with two different paradigmatic constellations, as Jan C. Schmidt attests in his treatise on the Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity: on the one hand interdisciplinarity selon technoscience (or "object oriented interdisciplinarity"), on the other hand interdisciplinarity selon sustainability science (or "problem-oriented inter- and transdisciplinarity").
To most of the readers familiar with both these types of research, or, more broadly, innovation regimes, such a juxtaposition will be once again intuitively convincing. It is all the more surprising in hindsight that the existing rich literature on interdisciplinarity has not made much of it up to now. The interdisciplinarity of e.g. nanotechnology or synthetic biology seems to have been discussed in other fora or under different headings than the interdisciplinarity of human ecology, sustainability science, ecological economics or science and technology studies, hindering a comprehensive, comparative discussion of the relating different modes of interdisciplinarity. In parallel, following Schmidt’s diagnosis, "interdisciplinarity has lost its critical momentum and its original spirit" (p. 1). The author links this qualitative loss to the missing differentiation of the different modes of interdisciplinarity. The ambition of his comparative analysis is thus to revive both these capacities.
Building on the general thesis that interdisciplinarity can be found in said two varieties, Schmidt provides us with detailed, empirically as well as theoretically informed accounts of each variety. He outlines their historical developments, addresses their connections to distinct research policies and research programs and further delineates their fundamental differences, in spite of their shared claim of an interdisciplinary character, their shared promise to deliver more than any single discipline could, their shared need for additional competencies and their shared demand for additional (public) support.
Schmidt discusses these assertions not only as purely philosophical or simply practical endeavours, but also as political moves: "Interdisciplinarity (…) is, above all, a political term: It is at the centre of recent knowledge politics and political epistemology. Whenever the notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ shows up in public as well as in scientific discourse, we are debating—explicitly or implicitly—the future of scientific knowledge and also the role and function of academic institutions and the university in society" (41).
Forms of Interdisciplinarity
While our understanding of what Schmidt labels as "object oriented interdisciplinarity" has been advanced considerably in recent years in analyses and discussions of ‘technoscience’ (or TechnoWissenschaft cp. Forman 2007 or Nordmann et al. 2011), it is the detailed discussion of the second variant, "problem-oriented interdisciplinarity", that I found most innovative.
In Chapter Seven on "nature and the sciences", the author outlines the influence of self-organisation and instability theory (both subsumable under systems theory and thus part of what Rudolf Stichweh 1994 has categorised as ‘transdisciplinary concepts’) on this variant, that he then goes on to label "critical-reflexive interdisciplinarity". He provides us with four aspects of such an interdisciplinarity:
(1) An inherent potential for self-reflexivity, self-awareness, and self-critique, linked to its "virtues, mindsets, and habits" (123);
(2) An inherent ambition to synthesise and a synoptic perspective;
(3) A perceived need to transform science and a strive to engage in such transformation, and;
(4) A predilection to not only address societal problems, but to address their "the background and underlying causes", in particular concerning "societal relations to nature" (124).
Still and on a final note, juxtaposing the two interdisciplinarities that systematically also opens for a further avenue of scrutiny: what if the two traditions had yet more in common than the above-mentioned assertions? What if they were both, representatives of two distinct socio-epistemic programmes on one level of abstraction, as well as representatives of one overarching socio-epistemic programme on another level? While Schmidt’s work provides us with valuable theoretical viewpoints and empirical observations that speak to such an analytical interest, it has not foregrounded such an ambition.
Other scholars have directly addressed a potential convergence or homology of the two interdisciplinarities. Herbert Simon in 1988 provided an outline of a ‘science of design’. Arie Rip and Jan-Peter Voß (2013) categorise the interdisciplinary labels of nanotechnology and sustainability research both as ‘umbrella terms’ characteristic of ‘strategic science’. Yet, others have assembled interdisciplinary specialities of both kinds under the term of (postmodern) ‘technoscience’ with references to French philosophy and a ‘logic of performativity’ (especially the work of Jean-François Lyotard, cp. Simons 2022).
It seems thus all the more important to adopt a differentiated view of the various contemporary interdisciplinarities we are confronted with. What are their political rationales at various levels of agency and what are their scientific as well as societal impacts in the short run as well as in the long run? We should not, the author warns us, simply cry for more interdisciplinarity to solve our society’s currently pressing issues; thorough reflection on the "goals, problems, values, underlying convictions, or institutional structures" (4) of the two interdisciplinarities we currently have at hand is called for. Such reflection will be well informed by a politically sensitive philosophy of science as well as by a politically literate and sensitive sociology of science, including recent attempts at a sociology of scientific movements (Frickel and Moore 2006; Frickel and Gross 2005).
References
Becher, Tony. 2001[1989]. Academic Tribes and Territories. Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines, 2nd edition. Buckingham, UK: SRHE and Open University Press.
Cohen, Benjamin R. 2001. "Science and Humanities: Across Two Cultures and into Science Studies." Endeavour 25 (1): 8–12.
Forman, Paul. 2007. "The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology." History and Technology 23 (1-2): 1–152.
Frickel, Scott and Kelly Moore. 2006. The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Frickel, Scott and Neil Gross. 2005. "A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements." American Sociological Review 70 (2): 204–232
Fuller, Steve. 1995. "A Tale of Two Cultures and Other Higher Superstitions: Review of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science." History of the Human Sciences 8 (1): 115–125.
Goertz, Gary and James Mahoney. 2012. A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Labinger, Jay A. and Harry Collins, eds. 2001. The One Culture? A Conversation about Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Nordmann, Alfred, Hans Radder and Gregor Schiemann. 2011. Science Transformed?: Debating Claims of an Epochal Break. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Ortolano, Guy. 2002. "Two Cultures, One University: The Institutional Origins of the ‘Two Cultures’ Controversy." Albion 34 (4): 606–662.
Rip, Arie and Jan-Peter Voß. 2013. "Umbrella Terms as Mediators in the Governance of Emerging Science and Technology." Science, Technology and Innovation Studies 9 (2): 39–59.
Simon, Herbert A. 1988. "The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial." Design Issues 4 (1/2): 67–82.
Simons, Massimiliano. 2022. "Jean‑François Lyotard and Postmodern Technoscience." Philosophy & Technology 35 (31, online first): 1–18.
Snow, Charles P. 1961[1959]. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The Rede Lecture 1959, 7th printing edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Stichweh, Rudolf. 1994. Wissenschaft, Universität, Professionen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Source: social-epistemology.com