Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800

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.

Table of Contents:
List of figures; Authors and affiliations; Foreword Mary S. Morgan, Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry; Prologues; 1. Narrative: A general purpose technology for science Mary S. Morgan; 2. What is narrative in narrative science? The narrative science approach Kim M. Hajek; Part I. 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 John E. Huss; 4. The narrative nature of geology and the rewriting of the stac fada story Andrew Hopkins; 5. Reasoning from narratives and models: reconstructing the tohoku earthquake Teru Miyake; 6. Stored and storied time in archaeology Anne Teather; Part II. 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 Devin Griffiths; 8. From memories to forecasting: Narrating imperial storm science Debjani Bhattacharyya; 9. Visual evidence and narrative in botany and war: Two domains, one practice Elizabeth Haines; 10. The trees' tale: Filigreed phylogenetic trees and integrated narratives Nina Kranke; 11. Process tracing and narrative science Sharon Crasnow; Part III. Research Narratives: When scientists write about their research, their narratives centre on their practices but reveal their beliefs about phenomena; 12. Research articles as narratives: Familiarizing communities with an approach Robert Meunier; 13. Thick and thin chemical narratives Mat Paskins; 14. Reporting on plagues: Epidemiological reasoning in the early twentieth century Lukas Engelmann; 15. The politics of representation: Narratives of automation in twentieth century American mathematics Stephanie Dick; 16. Chronicle, genealogy, and narrative: Understanding synthetic biology in the image of historiography Berry; Part IV. Narrative Sensibility and Argument: When narrative acts as a site for reasoning; 17. Anecdotes: epistemic switching in medical narratives Brian Hurwitz; 18. Narrative performance and the 'taboo on causal inference': A case study of conceptual remodelling and implicit causation Elspeth Jajdelska; 19. Reading mathematical proofs as narratives Line Edlsev Andersen; 20. Narrative solutions to a common evolutionary problem John Beatty; 21. Just-so what? Paula Olmos; 22. Narrative and natural language M. Norton Wise; Index.