Knowledge Consilience: One Culture, Two Cultures or Many Cultures?

TL;DR

This paper introduces quantitative measures for the relationship between scientific and literary cultures, revealing that the gap between these knowledge domains is increasing over time.

Contribution

It proposes the concepts of knowledge distance and consilience threshold to quantify cultural separation and integration among knowledge domains.

Findings

The gap between scientific and literary cultures is widening.

Quantitative measures of knowledge separation and coupling are introduced.

The study highlights increasing divergence in knowledge domains.

Abstract

The hostility between the two cultures, scientific and literary, was framed by C.P. Snow in 1959 and later by others. The scientific culture is nowadays often identified with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) whereas the literary culture generally refers to humanities and social sciences. Wilson expressed the wish for the unity of knowledge. We put forward the notions of knowledge distance and knowledge consilience threshold to quantitatively measure distance and coupling process between different branches of knowledge. Our findings suggest that the gulf between the two cultures is widening.