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?)
(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?)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZzVdomYHnI