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In the following text, does "the two cultures of science and the arts and humanities" mean the two cultures of "science" and "the arts and humanities"? I mean does "two cultures" refer to "science" and "the arts and humanities"?

The context:

The dramatic contrast between these two visions of reality makes manifest the extreme differences in the epistemological traditions which have underpinned and separated the two cultures of science and the arts and humanities through much of the twentieth century. Fundamentally, these concern whether distinctions can be made between the act of perceiving and the object perceived

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  • Yes. Since there's no single (common) word to denote "arts and humanities" as one group, even though the two are often lumped together, the phrase is typically used. It would be familiar to most native English readers (at least the college-educated ones), but clearly is confusing if you attempt to parse the sentence without understanding this.
    – Hot Licks
    Jul 12, 2015 at 13:55

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Yes. The writer is so accustomed to lumping arts and humanities together that he or she fails to anticipate a reader’s possible difficulty in sorting what looks like a list of three into two. Otherwise, this thought might call for those heavy-duty signifiers of binary antithesis, on the one hand and on the other [hand]:

. . . the epistemological traditions which have underpinned and separated the two cultures of science on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other, through much of the twentieth century.

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