<P> Stephen Jay Gould's The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox provides a different perspective . Assuming the dialectical interpretation, it argues that Snow's concept of "two cultures" is not only off the mark, it is a damaging and short - sighted viewpoint, and that it has perhaps led to decades of unnecessary fence - building . </P> <P> Simon Critchley, in Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction suggests: </P> <P> (Snow) diagnosed the loss of a common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed' literary intellectuals' on the other . If the former are in favour of social reform and progress through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow terms' natural Luddites' in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced industrial society . In Mill's terms, the division is between Benthamites and Coleridgeans . </P> <P> That is, Critchley argues that what Snow said represents a resurfacing of a discussion current in the mid-nineteenth century . Critchley describes the Leavis contribution to the making of a controversy as "a vicious ad hominem attack"; going on to describe the debate as "a familiar clash in English cultural history" citing also T.H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold . </P>

Thinking like a human social science and the two cultures problem