There is an entire science yet to be formalized in this essay. When the author begins to backtrack on their thesis, and then says:
> I don’t actually believe this to be a universally applicable principle, as there are lots of exceptions, but I feel that there is “something” about it that deserves our attention.
That "something" is identifying where our current sciences, our language, and our intellectual curiosities have not formalized investigation. The mere fact that this observation has no name that can be commonly referenced is the clearest indicator it's an overlooked aspect of living a life.
I wonder if these ideas are not formalized already, some philosophical school of thought labeling this with some too many syllable name. I also wonder if the Dunning–Kruger crowd's work touches on this aspect.
N.b., an Aristotelian substance is such that the form of the integral whole is in every part so to speak. This distinguishes integral wholes or substances from accidental wholes, like machines where the parts are just so arranged so that they happen to enter into certain causal relations. But the formal cause is strictly accidental; in true substances, in integral wholes, a substantial form renders the thing a true unity. The causal relations don't just-so-happen to be there, they don't just happen to result in an effect by virtue of their circumstance; they are intrinsically ordered toward an end.
And, of course, when you learn something, universal principles are presupposed by anything we study. Metaphysics, for example, studies the first principles of being qua being, and so whatever is known in a thing that is universally true or true of the class, is true of everything else, or of the class.
Furthermore, much of our knowledge is analogical. Thus, when we learn a new thing, we may do so by analogy or we may notice analogies. And let us not forget the Logos in which (or Whom) all finds its analogical being. The effect resembles in some sense its cause, and all that exists stands in an analogical relation to its creating and sustaining cause, the Logos.
One formalising "something" could be category theory, in which we say we don't care too much about what objects are like qua objects (indeed, we'll handwave many things away "up to isomorphism"), but we do care greatly about the structure preserving maps ("conceits" in the lit crit language) we can find from other objects to a given object, or conversely from a given object to other objects.
(if we're really hardcore, we'll even claim the objects don't even have much left to study after we've learned all that we can about the identity maps from each object back to itself)
Exercise for the reader: what is the structural equivalent of an epimorphism in Snow's other culture? a monomorphism?
(quick sanity check: do the humanities even have a way to talk about domains and codomains? Yes: "signifier" and "signified". What about cancellation?)
I think that there's a lot of work in this area. In some sense, complexity theory itself is this approach applied to dynamic systems. You cannot fully understand the system by studying the individual parts, so if you want to understand something deeply, you need to study it holistically. Because everything in reality is necessarily intertwined with everything else, you keep hitting adjacent fields.
> I don’t actually believe this to be a universally applicable principle, as there are lots of exceptions, but I feel that there is “something” about it that deserves our attention.
That "something" is identifying where our current sciences, our language, and our intellectual curiosities have not formalized investigation. The mere fact that this observation has no name that can be commonly referenced is the clearest indicator it's an overlooked aspect of living a life.
I wonder if these ideas are not formalized already, some philosophical school of thought labeling this with some too many syllable name. I also wonder if the Dunning–Kruger crowd's work touches on this aspect.