One Culture, Two Cultures, Three Cultures

Abstract

The university’s corporate culture is conditioned by the duality of its intellectual culture. The opposition of science and the humanities fuels a logic of “either/or” rather than “both/and” and encourages the two disciplines to compete for authority within the university’s authoritative structure. A university’s importance is defined by its exclusiveness, an exclusiveness maintained, historically, by the exclusion of different social groups. This attitude is mirrored in an attitude towards knowledge - the cult of the expert and of specialization, the belief that specialized forms of knowledge require esoteric codes and, therefore, that any advance in knowledge will be expressed in such codes. Distinguishing between the informal, practical and collaborative practices of “community knowledge” and their negation in the formal structures of “university knowledge” the chapter argues that the interactions across this boundary are an important concern for any group considering the future of universities. The sciences and the humanities share a capacity for problem-solving. Problem-solving is not a skill that can be learnt in isolation from the historical and philosophical context which is its necessary condition, nor is it a skill that can be taught by learning a set of specific rules. Problem-solving is an attempt to mediate between skill and knowledge. Narrative may be seen as one form of problem-solving which pervades social life. The chapter advocates a history of knowledge as an integral subject, available to students in both the humanities and the sciences and thereby holding the two cultures in a single frame. The history of knowledge stimulates intellectual curiosity by rejecting the idea that knowledge is monolithic. The sciences and the humanities can also be held in the same frame by the study of information theory, a subject which may provide the component of a common language for the exchange of experience and ideas across the boundaries of the two cultures. The chapter argues for a form of intellectual opportunism, for cultivating the capacity to experiment with a difficult language in a way that produces a hypothesis useful to the learner. For these proposals to be effective, we need to revise the metaphor of the university itself. The metaphor of the university as an encyclopaedia is suggested, a metaphor intended to evoke “the whole circle of learning”, an environment, the play of chance and invention, consultation and participation. The technological basis for this new encyclopaedia would be the computer as an instrument capable of providing an arbitrary, flexible system of classification which would offer large-scale access to - and rapid updating of - the knowledge base of the Encyclopaedia. The encyclopaedia would develop the potential of its eighteenth century forbear as a focus for information, debate, group thinking, and reflection.