In a couple of places, not least here, I have seen it noted recently that C. P. Snow's famous essay on `the Two Cultures' is now fifty, and reflections on how things have or haven't changed. I don't have anything much to say about that especially, although I stand by a notion that history is only defensible as an art, not a social science, and that one of the reasons for that is that `social science' as a category is useless and unhelpful. There's really very few definitions of that phrase that couldn't be included under either of `social engineering' or `humanity', except possibly using scientific tools to do arts stuff with but in that case it's an art dammit Janet etc. (N. B. no real Janets implicated in this condemnation.) Instead I wanted to point out something that has repeatedly nagged me about this question, which is that the whole debate between Arts and Sciences only really works in an Anglophone or Anglolexic sphere...

This here is the ceiling of the old lecture hall of the Austrian Academy of the Sciences, at least as it translates into English. But, what's the French or German for science? `Science', `Wissenschaft', respectively, both of which also mean just `knowledge'. All the Romance languages have some version of Latin `scientia', which likewise means just `knowledge'. And that's what the artwork here was painted to express, wisdom being handed down by teachers and on tablets to a romantic and fascinated world. All kinds of knowledge. The idea that science means the Popperian world of reproducibility, experiment and testing, by contrast, is modern and English. It's slowly being enforced on other languages' academies, but it's not something that people in the Middle Ages, where geometry was one of the Liberal Arts, or even the nineteenth century, would have recognised. Even now, the German-speaking states almost all havetheirAkademiederWissenschaften, France has the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques and Spain the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and these are the premier research institutions of the humanities in their respective lands. But in Britain, which I know best, the current split between the Arts & Humanities Research Board, now Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Council, previously the Science and Engineering Research Council and previously the Science Research Council, goes essentially back to the difference between the Royal Society, founded 1660 in some form, and the British Academy, founded 1902. I don't know what the equivalent bodies in the USA would be but it would be an interesting comparison. Elsewhere we don't have to have this separation, and one of the most interesting things about Snow's piece is therefore its potential to explain why in fact we do. And, indeed, it's pleasant to see that some people have used Science! and graphs and maps to argue that in fact, we don't, we just think we do. As a computing-in-the-humanities sort of guy, I can get behind that.

I spoke about this with an Austrian colleague at that same Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften when there a while back, and he was quite surprised by the English usage, which, though his English is very good, he hadn't fully taken on board. I had to differentiate the `two cultures' for him by using the image of the title: for English-speakers, I said, `science' is labcoats, test-tubes, moon-shots and cures for cancer, and what he and I do is tweed jackets and dusty chalkboards. (We actually both have our living in applying computing to numismatics, but that's not important right now; we work in museums...) His opinion was that the way that the locals saw the Akademie der Wissenschaften was definitely tweeds, pipes, absurd beards, not labcoats, and wondered if he should start presenting in a labcoat so as to attract more press attention. There's all kinds of questions one could then ask about that, but the first one it brings to my mind is, why did we, do we, let this divorce of fields by method happen? and secondly, please, people in my field, what is it with the tweeds and corduroy? Don't you feel the clammy clasp of stereotype about your shoulders every time you don them? I think we need a Third Way. Maybe I'll start lecturing in evening dress. At least it's a different stereotype...