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

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.