Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800

Description

Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from geology to psychology, chemistry, physics, botany, mathematics, epidemiology, and biological engineering. Taking in shipwrecks, human evolution, military intelligence, and mass extinctions, this landmark study revises our understanding of what science is, and the roles of narrative in scientists' work. This title is also available as Open Access. Cover Half-title page Title page Copyright page Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements I Prologues 1 Narrative: A General-Purpose Technology for Science 2 What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach II Matters of Time: When time matters in the sciences, it matters in their narratives, but those narratives rarely use a simple account of time 3 Mass Extinctions and Narratives of Recurrence 4 The Narrative Nature of Geology and the Rewriting of the Stac Fada Story 5 Reasoning from Narratives and Models: Reconstructing the Tohoku Earthquake 6 Stored and Storied Time in Archaeology III Accessing Nature’s Narratives: When nature is seen as narrating itself, narrative becomes a constituent feature of scientific accounts 7 Great Exaptations: On Reading Darwin’s Plant Narratives 8 From Memories to Forecasting: Narrating Imperial Storm Science 9 Visual Evidence and Narrative in Botany and War: Two Domains, One Practice 10 The Trees’ Tale: Filigreed Phylogenetic Trees and Integrated Narratives IV Interlude 11 Process Tracing and Narrative Science V Research Narratives: When scientists write about their research, their narratives centre on their practices but reveal their beliefs about phenomena 12 Research Narratives and Narratives of Nature in Scientific Articles: How Scientists Familiarize Their Communities with New Approaches and Epistemic Objects 13 Thick and Thin Chemical Narratives 14 Reporting on Plagues: Epidemiological Reasoning in the Early Twentieth Century 15 The Politics of Representation: Narratives of Automation in Twentieth-Century American Mathematics 16 Chronicle, Genealogy and Narrative: Understanding Synthetic Biology in the Image of Historiography VI Narrative Sensibility and Argument: When narrative acts as a site for reasoning 17 Anecdotes: Epistemic Switching in Medical Narratives 18 Narrative Performance and the ‘Taboo on Causal Inference’: A Case Study of Conceptual Remodelling and Implicit Causation 19 Reading Mathematical Proofs as Narratives 20 Narrative Solutions to a Common Evolutionary Problem 21 Just-so What? VII Finale 22 Narrative and Natural Language Index