ABSTRACT
In his well-known "Two Cultures" essay C. P. Snow reported a gap between the literary and natural-scientific cultures. Acknowledging that "a good deal of the scientific feeling" is shared by some of his "American sociological friends," Snow was well aware that there was a degree of artificiality in limiting the number of cultures to the "very dangerous" one of two. Yet, he based his binarist decision largely on the cohesion of the natural-scientific and literary communities that made of them cultures "not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense."! The intellectual division of labor and the development of disciplinary languages certainly seem to substantiate his reference to two incommensurate cultures. Anyone who has sat on a university committee reviewing grant proposals from, and consisting of citizens of, each of the cultures must have observed the pattern of who accuses whom of using jargon and be convinced that at least the academic version of Snow's gap, that between the humanities and the natural sciences, has widened into a seemingly unbridgeable abyss. It has become commonplace that the two cultures have nothing in common.
