our completed workshops
PUZZLES AND PROBLEMS OF CLASSIFYING AND CATEGORIZING - 6 NOVEMBER 2017
The aim of the workshop was to consider the puzzles and problems of making categories and classes. Our focus was on processes: the activities of making groups by dividing things into classes or giving labels to things so that they fit into classes. To help this focus on doing - on processes rather than outcomes - it was designed to draw on our combined experiential knowledge from a variety of different fields.
Programme: Staffan Mülle-Wille (Exeter): How do you start? (natural history and anthropology) Mat Paskins (Aberystwyth): About the grain: Scale and complexity? (science futures) Yossi Lichtenstein (Cass Business School): Computational complexity classes (computer science) Andrea Woody (Washington): (chemistry) Jan-Willem Romeijn (Groningen): Multiple characteristics and multiple conditions. (psychiatry) Dominic Berry (Edinburgh): Making an archive, and where to stop? (biology/ agriculture) Santi Funari (Cass Business School): Where do collective categories come from? (industries) Rachel Ankeny (Adelaide): Coding and classifying in qualitative research |
NARRATIVE SCIENCE AND ITS VISUAL PRACTICES - 19 APRIL 2018
Science abounds with visual materials: exemplary objects, 3D models, photos, diagrams, maps, graphs. Scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of science have highlighted various features and roles of these objects and the practices in which they are embedded, including reasoning, speculation, demonstration, illustration, communication, and others. This workshop focussed on the association of visual practices with narratives in knowledge making. In some cases, visual objects embed narrative qualities in themselves; in other cases, narratives are needed to make sense of the visual materials. Contributions to the workshop addressed these issues through case studies across a range of disciplines and fields, including archaeology, aerial photography, journalism, geology, phylogenetics, cell biology, developmental biology, and biomedicine. Presentations closely analysed examples of visual materials in various media and the practices in which they are embedded. The discussion evaluated analytic tools that can be mobilized to think about the question raised at the intersection of visual practices and narrative in science.
Programme: Mirjam Brusius - Narratives of doubt in the history of photography Elizabeth Haines - Pathway and Narrative: Palaeobotany and aerial photography in the work of Hugh Hamshaw Thomas Andrew Hopkins - Plotting Earth’s History: The Narrative in a Geological Map Nina Kranke - Nested narratives: phylogenetic trees and evolutionary history Nicola Williams - Back to the Drawing Board: Irene Manton Visualizing and Modelling the MidCentury Cell Robert Meunier - Borrowing arrows: Diagrams and mechanistic narratives of gene action Annamaria Carusi - Who sees? Who tells? Focalisation as a narrative device in computational biosciences Jonathan Gray - Doing Things with Networks in Journalism and Social Research |
NARRATIVE SCIENCE UCL-LSE INTEGRATED HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE READING GROUP - 22 MAY 2018
The logos of both UCL and LSE are subject to copyright and are not available for reproduction.
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This workshop built on a longstanding collaboration between scholars at UCL and LSE with shared interests in the integration of history and philosophy of science. Every year the department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL and the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at LSE, co-organise a reading group around a dedicated theme. This year we adopted the theme of narrative, and selected readings from the 2017 special issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science on ‘Narrative in Science’, co-edited by Prof. Mary Morgan as part of her Narrative Science ERC funded research project. This workshop consolidates the three earlier sessions (1st, 8th, 15th of May) and gives staff and postgraduate students the opportunity to present short prepared responses to the narrative science thesis, in dedicated discussion panels.
Programme: 15:00 Chiara Ambrosio (UCL) - Welcome and introduction to panel on narrative and coherence. Panel: Roman Frigg (LSE), Brendan Clarke (UCL), Hernán Bobadilla (University of Vienna), Kim Hajek (LSE). 15:30 Andrew Hopkins (LSE) - Introduction to panel on particulars and generalities. Panel: Claudia Cristalli (UCL), Mike Stuart (LSE), Christian Hennig (LSE), Katherine Jane Cecil (UCL). 16:00 Dominic Berry (LSE) - Introduction to panel on narratives v models. Panel: Kate Vredenburgh (Harvard), Erman Sozudogru (UCL), Robert Meunier (LSE), Mary Morgan (LSE). 16:30 Mat Paskins (LSE) - Response from MSc students. Panel: Sophie Osiecki (UCL), Amelie Peschansk (UCL), Julia Sanchez-Dorado (UCL), Sophie Wang (UCL). 17:00-18:00 Open discussion in response to the presentations and the pre-circulated readings |
EXPERT NARRATIVES: SYSTEMS, POLICIES AND PRACTICES - 10TH DECEMBER 2018
Organisers: Professor Mary S. Morgan and Dr Mat Paskins
Venue: London School of Economics and Political Science DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHOP BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Experts in a wide range of fields routinely construct narratives, especially (though not only) in the aftermath of critical failures. Examples of such narratives include serious case reviews in health care or child protection, inquiries into mechanical failure when a building has collapsed or a plane has crashed, or discussions of how a product has turned out to be unsafe. These narratives often provide the basis for the reform of existing systems and processes, or the construction of new ones: a specific series of events, represented in narrative form, is supposed to provide the basis for patterns of action in the future. At the same time, translation from narrative form into the language of other kinds of expertise can create serious tensions. Narrative forms of expert knowledge raise the question: how do narrative ways of explaining or giving an account of something come up against other ways of knowing things? This was a one day workshop, organised as part of the ERC-funded project “Narrative Science”, and brought together scholars and practitioners in a range of expert fields, including social work, engineering, health, accountancy and history of science to explore the construction and use of expert narratives and the processes which they feed into. There were eight speakers in total, who all described cases from their own areas of expertise. Some of the questions which speakers considered included:
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NARRATIVES AS NAVIGATION TOOLS - 22 MARCH 2019
This workshop is organised as a collaboration between the Narrative Science project and The Royal Institution. Please see the bottom of this announcement for information concerning the 4 PhD travel bursaries we are making available for this event. We anticipate the workshop starting around 10:00 and ending roughly around 18:00
Organised by Dr. Sabine Baier and Prof. Mary S. Morgan This workshop explores how narratives function as navigation tools in helping scientists create new things with specific purposes, such as making a new drug, a new chemical, a new hybrid plant, a new material, a new set of social categories (and so forth) – cases where novel things must have special characteristics to attain their purpose. Such narratives might work in complement to a scientific community’s theories, hypotheses, and common practices or might cut across them as a way of introducing or justifying novel moves in their scientific research. They may offer efficient decision-making heuristics in the absence of rules that might be determined by theories, or by suggesting or enabling lateral moves, they may offer ways to overcome more rigid rules and practices. Discovery narratives that scientists tell to themselves as they do their work might then have features of the ‘quest’ in overcoming difficulties, or might be ‘picaresque’ and episodic. They might differ between fields, or betray some standard line. And their involvement in the process of navigating to an outcome might differ radically from the post-hoc ‘discovery’ narratives told after a successful outcome. And what happens when those navigational narratives fail to produce the desired outcome? In the workshop we wish to explore when, and how, narratives are constructed and used to support scientists in making their daily decisions of what to try next. Experts from the scientific communities, as well as historians and philosophers of science, will help us to gain insight into these questions by discussing examples and cases of such navigational narratives. We are grateful to the financial contributions and contributions in kind from the European Research Council, the Collegium Helveticum Zurich, and the Royal Institution. If you would like to express interest in attending please contact Dr Dominic Berry: [email protected] The number of places is unfortunately limited, so please make sure to write to us sooner rather than later. The deadline for expression of interest is Friday 1st of March. We will notify those we are able to accommodate shortly thereafter. Speakers and titles: Dr. Mat Paskins, LSE London - 'Narratives of Discovering Substitutes' Dr. Martin Stahl, Hoffmann-La Roche AG Basel, Switzerland - 'What’s the Story? Narratives, Biases and Planning in Contemporary Drug Discovery' Dr. Rebecca Wilbanks, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, USA - 'Biotech Futures: Speculative Science and Speculative Fiction in the Birth of Synthetic Biology' Dr. Sabine Baier, LSE London/ETH Zurich – “I usually go for pretty compounds” – Managing epistemic distances in drug discovery through narratives' Dr. Cathal Cummins, The University of Edinburgh - 'Go with the flow: how we captured a vortex' Dr. Miguel Garcia-Sancho, The University of Edinburgh - 'On time, history and expectations: how the narration of the past shapes the future of contemporary biomedicine' Dr. Karen Polizzi, Imperial College London - 'Cyclical design of the engineering design cycle' PhD travel bursaries Update 5/3/2019: All PhD travel bursaries for this event have now been allocated. |
DOES TIME ALWAYS PASS? TEMPORALITIES IN SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES - 30-31 MAY 2019
Workshop organised as a collaboration between the Narrative Science Project and The Royal Institution.
DOWNLOAD THE ABSTRACT BOOK
Venue: The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS.
We anticipate starting at 10:00 (with coffee available from 09.30) on the 30th and ending by 17.30 on the 31st.
Organised by Prof. Mary S. Morgan and Dr. Andrew Hopkins
The standard view of narrative is inextricably bound up with the passage of time. Narrative scholars are convinced that time is an essential element in any narrative, and it has been thought equally essential, though treated in different ways, by philosophers of history. But exactly how to think about time in the narratives of science is not self-evident. And if we look at how scientists use time in narratives, we see a number of different ways in which it is taken into account and is deployed. In this workshop, the focus will be on the different temporalities in narratives as they occur in scientific discourses. The obvious loci for such explorations are what are generally referred to as the historical sciences, that is, those that seek to reconstruct the past on the basis of what can be observed in the present. However, time and its narrative expression are to be found in a wide variety of places, some of which will be explored by the speakers at the workshop. Throughout the workshop, the question of how essential time is to narrative will remain open for argument.
We are grateful to the financial contributions and contributions in kind from the European Research Council and the Royal Institution.
If you would like to express interest in attending please contact Dr Dominic Berry: [email protected]
The number of places is unfortunately limited, so please make sure to write to us sooner rather than later. The deadline for expression of interest is Friday May 17. We will notify those we are able to accommodate shortly thereafter.
Speakers and titles:
DOWNLOAD THE ABSTRACT BOOK
Venue: The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS.
We anticipate starting at 10:00 (with coffee available from 09.30) on the 30th and ending by 17.30 on the 31st.
Organised by Prof. Mary S. Morgan and Dr. Andrew Hopkins
The standard view of narrative is inextricably bound up with the passage of time. Narrative scholars are convinced that time is an essential element in any narrative, and it has been thought equally essential, though treated in different ways, by philosophers of history. But exactly how to think about time in the narratives of science is not self-evident. And if we look at how scientists use time in narratives, we see a number of different ways in which it is taken into account and is deployed. In this workshop, the focus will be on the different temporalities in narratives as they occur in scientific discourses. The obvious loci for such explorations are what are generally referred to as the historical sciences, that is, those that seek to reconstruct the past on the basis of what can be observed in the present. However, time and its narrative expression are to be found in a wide variety of places, some of which will be explored by the speakers at the workshop. Throughout the workshop, the question of how essential time is to narrative will remain open for argument.
We are grateful to the financial contributions and contributions in kind from the European Research Council and the Royal Institution.
If you would like to express interest in attending please contact Dr Dominic Berry: [email protected]
The number of places is unfortunately limited, so please make sure to write to us sooner rather than later. The deadline for expression of interest is Friday May 17. We will notify those we are able to accommodate shortly thereafter.
Speakers and titles:
- Norton Wise (UCLA) - Faraday's lines of force and the temporality of serial narration
- John Beatty (UBC, Vancouver) - When you can't get there from here: The importance of temporal order in evolutionary biology and ecology
- Dorothea Debus (Universität Konstanz) - Memory, imagination and narrative
- Paula Olmos (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) - Narratives in scientific argument and explanation
- Rosa Hardt (OPEN Scotland) - Narrative Understanding: Parts, Wholes, and Recombinable Systems
- William Matthews (LSE, London) - Time and ethnographic generalisation in anthropology: an example from Chinese divination
- John Huss (University of Akron, Ohio) - Mass extinction, narrative closure, and evidence
- Teru Miyake (NTU, Singapore) - Temporal detail and evidence in seismic source reconstruction
- Anne Teather (University of Manchester) - Stored and storied time in the Neolithic
- Elspeth Jajdelska (University of Strathclyde) - Do we always need a timeline? The roles of temporal sequence in art narratives and science narratives
- Thomas Bonnin (University of Exeter) - Explaining the origin of eukaryotic cells between narratives and mechanisms
- Tirthankar Roy (LSE, London) - Technological change in the Indian textile industry (title TBC)
- Daniel Pargman (KTH, Stockholm) - Using allohistorical narratives to envision alternative energy futures
- Andrew Hopkins (LSE, London) - Alfred Wegener's arguments for continental drift: A consillience of narrative explanations
Scientific Polyphony: How Scientific Narratives Configure Many ‘Voices’ - 3 JUNE 2019
Workshop organised by Dr Kim M. Hajek and Prof. Mary S. Morgan
3 June 2019, London School of Economics and Political Science
DOWNLOAD THE ABSTRACT BOOK
In the history of science, especially of the human and observational sciences, it has often been the case that knowledge-making activities drew upon many ‘voices’—accounts of a storm given by different observers; patient voices incorporated into a psychological case history; myths transcribed by an anthropologist. What many of these examples share is that the information provided by different voices takes narrative form in its own right. Yet scientists have also organised them into related groupings or broader narratives, as a way to elucidate particular research problems.
In this workshop, we ask how narrative has helped scientists to configure extended chunks of information, and ultimately to manage a multiplicity of voices in their enquiry. Using case studies from across a range of fields, workshop participants explore the roles played by narrative forms of explanation both within and across the contributions of multiple voices to science. Of particular concern are the ways that narrative serves to order polyphonic material into a larger epistemic scheme, and reciprocally, how narrative valorises or suppresses particular voices, or indeed shapes what counts as a ‘voice’ at all.
This workshop is organised as part of the Narrative Science Project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 694732). For more information on the project, please see our website: www.narrative-science.org
Speakers:
Dr Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
Ordering Cyclones: The Courtroom in the Making of Meteorological Sciences in Colonial India.
A/Prof. Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California
Darwin, Entrainment, and the Ecology of Form.
Dr Kim Hajek, LSE
Silencing Suggestion? Narratives of Suggestive Psychotherapy and Category Disputes in Hippolyte Bernheim’s Psychological Cases.
Prof. Isabelle Kalinowski, ENS, and Dr Camille Joseph, Université Paris 8
Unheard Words. Franz Boas and the Anthropology of Voices.
A/Prof. Birgit Lang, University of Melbourne
The Case of the Sexological Patient. From Narrative Polyphony to Visual Affect and Fragmentation.
Prof. Harro Maas, Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne
A Community on Paper: Reflections on a Witness Seminar on the History of Experimental Economics.
A/Prof. Jill Slinger (and Dr Lotte Bontje), TU Delft
On Narrative Competition in Coastal Policy Development.
Dr Rhianedd Smith, University of Reading
Weaving Narratives from Data and Myth: Multi-Vocal Heritage Interpretation at Glastonbury Abbey.
scientific_polyphony_abstract_book.pdf
3 June 2019, London School of Economics and Political Science
DOWNLOAD THE ABSTRACT BOOK
In the history of science, especially of the human and observational sciences, it has often been the case that knowledge-making activities drew upon many ‘voices’—accounts of a storm given by different observers; patient voices incorporated into a psychological case history; myths transcribed by an anthropologist. What many of these examples share is that the information provided by different voices takes narrative form in its own right. Yet scientists have also organised them into related groupings or broader narratives, as a way to elucidate particular research problems.
In this workshop, we ask how narrative has helped scientists to configure extended chunks of information, and ultimately to manage a multiplicity of voices in their enquiry. Using case studies from across a range of fields, workshop participants explore the roles played by narrative forms of explanation both within and across the contributions of multiple voices to science. Of particular concern are the ways that narrative serves to order polyphonic material into a larger epistemic scheme, and reciprocally, how narrative valorises or suppresses particular voices, or indeed shapes what counts as a ‘voice’ at all.
This workshop is organised as part of the Narrative Science Project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 694732). For more information on the project, please see our website: www.narrative-science.org
Speakers:
Dr Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
Ordering Cyclones: The Courtroom in the Making of Meteorological Sciences in Colonial India.
A/Prof. Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California
Darwin, Entrainment, and the Ecology of Form.
Dr Kim Hajek, LSE
Silencing Suggestion? Narratives of Suggestive Psychotherapy and Category Disputes in Hippolyte Bernheim’s Psychological Cases.
Prof. Isabelle Kalinowski, ENS, and Dr Camille Joseph, Université Paris 8
Unheard Words. Franz Boas and the Anthropology of Voices.
A/Prof. Birgit Lang, University of Melbourne
The Case of the Sexological Patient. From Narrative Polyphony to Visual Affect and Fragmentation.
Prof. Harro Maas, Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne
A Community on Paper: Reflections on a Witness Seminar on the History of Experimental Economics.
A/Prof. Jill Slinger (and Dr Lotte Bontje), TU Delft
On Narrative Competition in Coastal Policy Development.
Dr Rhianedd Smith, University of Reading
Weaving Narratives from Data and Myth: Multi-Vocal Heritage Interpretation at Glastonbury Abbey.
scientific_polyphony_abstract_book.pdf
NARRATIVE SCIENCE IN TECHNO-ENVIRONMENTS - 18-19 JULY 2019
For the dedicated workshop page please see: NARRATIVE SCIENCE IN TECHNO-ENVIRONMENTS
Narrative and Mathematical Argument - 28 september 2019
Narrative Science Workshop
Saturday 28th September
at London School of Economics
Organised by Dr Dominic Berry and Professor Mary S. Morgan
DOWNLOAD THE ABSTRACT BOOK AND WORKSHOP REPORT
Doing mathematics and telling narratives might seem at the opposite end of the scientific research enterprise, but - as we have already found in our Narrative Science project - narratives crop up even where you least expect them in the sciences including in the company of mathematics. The issue to be explored in the workshop is how, when, and why, narratives work with mathematics rather than against it. The questions of interest include:
The aim of this workshop is to explore examples - cases - of the use of narratives in the practices of mathematics by mathematicians, or perhaps by scientists using various forms of mathematics. It is about how narratives function with mathematics in various way, at different sites, and for different purposes at the professional level, rather than on how narratives function in pedagogy, or in public engagement. For further discussion of the project, we invite you to look at the website (above), and the introduction to the special issue of the project for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2017).
Confirmed Speakers:
Stephanie Dick
Karine Chemla
Line Andersen
Fenner Tanswell
David Corfield
Michael Friedman
Saturday 28th September
at London School of Economics
Organised by Dr Dominic Berry and Professor Mary S. Morgan
DOWNLOAD THE ABSTRACT BOOK AND WORKSHOP REPORT
Doing mathematics and telling narratives might seem at the opposite end of the scientific research enterprise, but - as we have already found in our Narrative Science project - narratives crop up even where you least expect them in the sciences including in the company of mathematics. The issue to be explored in the workshop is how, when, and why, narratives work with mathematics rather than against it. The questions of interest include:
- How does narrative work with the deductive nature of mathematics? Is there a special form of ‘narrative argument’ to be found in mathematics? If so, is the narrative complementary to the reasoning, even perhaps an essential partner to the argument, or is there a creative tension between the two?
- What characteristics does narrative have when it is found with mathematical reasoning? Do such narratives share the virtues of elegance and simplicity often associated with mathematics? What counts as a ‘good narrative’ when found in or with mathematical work?
- Do narratives in (or of) proof-making work differently from narratives associated with other kinds of mathematical reasoning? Do narratives work more effectively with demonstrations or with explorations in mathematical work? Do narratives have a better hold, or find a more natural home, in certain kinds of mathematics, or with certain kinds of mathematical arguments?
- Are narratives associated with particular professional practices in mathematics? Do those narratives transfer without alteration into pedagogical practices or do they disappear there?
The aim of this workshop is to explore examples - cases - of the use of narratives in the practices of mathematics by mathematicians, or perhaps by scientists using various forms of mathematics. It is about how narratives function with mathematics in various way, at different sites, and for different purposes at the professional level, rather than on how narratives function in pedagogy, or in public engagement. For further discussion of the project, we invite you to look at the website (above), and the introduction to the special issue of the project for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2017).
Confirmed Speakers:
Stephanie Dick
Karine Chemla
Line Andersen
Fenner Tanswell
David Corfield
Michael Friedman
Anecdotes: Little Narratives that Carry Bigger Weight - 6th november 2019
DOWNLOAD THE BOOK OF ABSTRACTS AND WORKSHOP WRAP-UP
Wednesday 6th November at London School of Economics
Organised by Dr Dominic Berry and Professor Mary S. Morgan
Anecdotes are often dismissed in scientific circles with the accompanying adjective ‘mere’. Understood as small stories, told by someone and reported to others - what possible value could they have to the scientist? But it seems they do. Anecdotes may regularly circulate in a science, and some scientists welcome them.
The OED defines anecdote as “The narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking. (At first, an item of gossip.)” Apart from the association with ‘gossip’ (and earlier definitions that mention ‘secret’ records), this seems unexceptional. So why are the narratives of anecdote regularly dismissed as ‘mere’ in scientists’ comments:
This half day workshop explores examples of anecdotes in use to examine the functions of these small, detachable narratives in various scientific fields and contexts.
For further discussion of the project, we invite you to look at the website (above), and the introduction to the special issue of the project for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2017).
Programme timing - 6th of November
14:00 Start
14:15-15:45 Session 1 (two talks, 20 minute talk and 25 minute questions each)
15:45-16:15 Tea/coffee break
16:15-17:45 Session 2 (two talks, 20 minute talk and 25 minute questions each)
Speakers include:
Prof. Brian Hurwitz
Dr Robert Meunier and Dr Martin Böhnert
Prof. Mary Morgan
Dr Guillaume Yon
Wednesday 6th November at London School of Economics
Organised by Dr Dominic Berry and Professor Mary S. Morgan
Anecdotes are often dismissed in scientific circles with the accompanying adjective ‘mere’. Understood as small stories, told by someone and reported to others - what possible value could they have to the scientist? But it seems they do. Anecdotes may regularly circulate in a science, and some scientists welcome them.
The OED defines anecdote as “The narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking. (At first, an item of gossip.)” Apart from the association with ‘gossip’ (and earlier definitions that mention ‘secret’ records), this seems unexceptional. So why are the narratives of anecdote regularly dismissed as ‘mere’ in scientists’ comments:
- Perhaps because of that early association with gossip - of being passed on rather than direct from the original observer - they are perceived to have doubtful truth value; yet anecdotes are about real people/events, and in current understanding preserve greater integrity in retelling than either gossip or rumour.
- Perhaps because they are isolated from their context, so their scientific value is undermined by their failure to fill in the surroundings from which they come, as happens in a case study.
- Perhaps because they report one particular event, and so - taken as a form of evidence - they look more like little bits of history, comparing unfavourably with both the multiple observations of statistical data and the fully wrapped case study narratives of science. (Yet, conceived as cases, they might be taken as a class of evidence - as within medicine.)
- Perhaps because they are taken as a vernacular report, with connotations of amateurism at odds with the scientific attention needed to report events properly (though they may still attract expert attention).
This half day workshop explores examples of anecdotes in use to examine the functions of these small, detachable narratives in various scientific fields and contexts.
For further discussion of the project, we invite you to look at the website (above), and the introduction to the special issue of the project for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2017).
Programme timing - 6th of November
14:00 Start
14:15-15:45 Session 1 (two talks, 20 minute talk and 25 minute questions each)
15:45-16:15 Tea/coffee break
16:15-17:45 Session 2 (two talks, 20 minute talk and 25 minute questions each)
Speakers include:
Prof. Brian Hurwitz
Dr Robert Meunier and Dr Martin Böhnert
Prof. Mary Morgan
Dr Guillaume Yon
our completed symposia and conference panels
Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland - Narrative and Science online workshop - 26 MARCH 2021
Prof Mary S. Morgan and Dr Kim M. Hajek are speaking at this international workshop, which you can learn more about and register for here: https://research.tuni.fi/narrare/event/narrative-and-science/
Call for papers - Narrative in Economics: Historical Experiences - deadline april 5th 2021
The history of the usage of narrative in economics is an unwritten story. This workshop will explore the historical use of narrative in economists’ writings - whether they do so in describing observations, in making inferences or arguments, or in laying out law-like claims.
This is an excellent moment for such a workshop: we have two current economists in the public eye talking and writing about something they each call ‘narrative economics’ Robert Shiller and Christina Romer. The former is concerned with social/public narratives of current financial events; the latter undertakes detailed investigations into the historical verbal records of decisions about financial markets in order to pinpoint those decision factors. Our focus here is rather different: we are interested in economists’ use of narrative in their own economic writings. The historical record is potentially rich, as is the range of narrative forms they have used. The classical economists engaged in broad narratives to understand and portray the engines of growth and distribution. The marginalists used mini-narratives to explicate their new theories of value. Early game theory had anecdotal narratives dictating the rules of a game that indicated that game’s identity. Narratives have often accompanied applied economics results: in attempts to understand unexpected behavioural patterns in the early classroom experiments; alongside statistical tests in discussions of applied econometrics; and in arguments about the behaviour of the macro-economy.
The workshop will be online in early September 2021, likely 3-4th. The aim is to discuss 1st drafts of papers for a special issue of History of Political Economy. Please send your ideas – short abstracts – to the workshop joint-organisers by April 5th:
Mary S. Morgan: [email protected]
Tom Stapleford: [email protected]
This is an excellent moment for such a workshop: we have two current economists in the public eye talking and writing about something they each call ‘narrative economics’ Robert Shiller and Christina Romer. The former is concerned with social/public narratives of current financial events; the latter undertakes detailed investigations into the historical verbal records of decisions about financial markets in order to pinpoint those decision factors. Our focus here is rather different: we are interested in economists’ use of narrative in their own economic writings. The historical record is potentially rich, as is the range of narrative forms they have used. The classical economists engaged in broad narratives to understand and portray the engines of growth and distribution. The marginalists used mini-narratives to explicate their new theories of value. Early game theory had anecdotal narratives dictating the rules of a game that indicated that game’s identity. Narratives have often accompanied applied economics results: in attempts to understand unexpected behavioural patterns in the early classroom experiments; alongside statistical tests in discussions of applied econometrics; and in arguments about the behaviour of the macro-economy.
The workshop will be online in early September 2021, likely 3-4th. The aim is to discuss 1st drafts of papers for a special issue of History of Political Economy. Please send your ideas – short abstracts – to the workshop joint-organisers by April 5th:
Mary S. Morgan: [email protected]
Tom Stapleford: [email protected]
'NARRATIVE VOICES AND EXEMPLARY TEXTS' SYMPOSIUM AT CHEIRON CONFERENCE -
21 JUNE 2018
21 JUNE 2018
Copyright for this image is retained, and it is therefore not available for reproduction.
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Within the history of science, scholars are increasingly attending to the epistemic roles played by narrative. Although it is well known that texts in the developing human and social sciences frequently took narrative form—Freud’s comparison of his case histories to short stories is just one prominent example—what is less clear is how exactly narrative functioned to constitute and disseminate scientific knowledge. Notably, to what kinds of knowledge did savants gain access by employing narrative? What textual features allowed narratives to perform explanatory, as well as descriptive, functions? Who narrated human-scientific texts, and what epistemic weight can be given to other voices present in the story?
In this panel, we explored narrative knowing in the nascent human/social sciences of Roman Antiquity and of nineteenth-century England and France. More specifically, we interrogate narrator roles and narrative voices within a set of self-contained texts—exempla, observations, séance reports (all bearing some relation to today’s case histories)—and the ways they inflect understanding of their objects of study. For all the evident diversity in our exemplary narratives, we can nonetheless begin to trace some common strands in the intersection of narrative with human-scientific knowledge. In his exempla, Roman rhetorician Valerius Maximus directly intervenes to guide reader understandings of racial group-membership through the ambiguous connotations of sanguis, while Nancy physician Hippolyte Bernheim similarly takes over the narration of one psychotherapeutic observation to fill in what its original patient-narrator could not, by definition, explain. Yet in the presence of this patient voice, and even more so in the multiplicity of voices—skeptics, witnesses, spirits—found in accounts of automatic writing in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, we see the collective, polyphonic, often messy means by which narratives advance enquiry in the human/social sciences. Chair and Discussant: Gordon McOuat (University of King’s College) Sarah Lawrence (University of New England, Australia) - Exemplary Blood: Valerius Maximus, Model Tales and Hypodescent. Kim M. Hajek (London School of Economics) - Scientific Storytellers in French Psychological and Psychotherapeutic Observations c.a. 1875–1895. David G. Horn (The Ohio State University) - Writing Spirits: Polyvocality and the Social Production of Psychical Research. |
'NARRATIVE PRACTICES IN THE SCIENCES' SYMPOSIUM AT SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE IN PRACTICE CONFERENCE - 1 JULY 2018
Our thanks to Prof. Sabina Leonelli for the use of this image, which she took at SPSP.
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Scientists’ accounts of their fields contain many narrative elements which can be found in various forms, both visual and linguistic, in scientific texts of all kinds. There are narratives about the subject matter of research as well as narratives about the research process, both of which can come neatly separated or be deeply intertwined; there are narratives about small facts and narratives concerning the big picture; finally, there are narratives that appear in published articles and narratives that figure in communication within smaller or larger, interdisciplinary groups of scientists. Such narratives reflect the material practices of the sciences in which they occur and constitute representational practices in themselves. For this reason, a focus on narratives can elucidate many topics pertinent to the philosophy of science in practice, from questions regarding the way experimental practice enters the discursive space, to issues concerning the integration of data from various research fields, to problems of case based reasoning. Is narrative a tool of inference, of explanation, of coherence-making, of prompting discovery? The session addressed and explored such questions about the role of narratives in the sciences, and participants drew on various materials from the history and current developments in chemistry, embryology, biological engineering and anthropology.
The individual contributions built on and expand recent work on narratives. It has been argued that narratives are not limited to certain areas (e.g. history or historical sciences such as evolutionary biology), nor can their functions be reduced to ones of rhetoric nor the communication of scientific findings to broader audiences. Instead, they have epistemic and ontological functions associated with representation and explanation in many fields of the natural and social sciences (e.g. Morgan and Wise, 2017). While those studies have begun to develop an account of narratives in science, there are many so-far unasked questions about their roles. Robert Meunier - Ordering in research narratives and natural narratives Mat Paskins - Making and Narrating Chemical Beginnings Mary S. Morgan - Inference ‘within the case’: Valency between micro and macro-narratives Dominic Berry - Narrative measurement |
'BETWEEN NARRATIVE AND SCIENCE: HISTORICISING NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGE IN THE MODERN DISCIPLINE OF PSYCHOLOGY' PANEL AT EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES - 17-20 JULY 2018
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What epistemic roles does narrative play in the modern scientific discipline of psychology and how might narrative intersect productively with persistent anxiety about the reliability of psychological methods and findings? If we review the discipline from its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century, we can find many instances of narrative in the monographs, case histories, and pedagogical texts generated by researchers in the field. It is notorious that Freud likened his case histories to short stories; reciprocally, and several decades earlier, Zola proposed the “experimental novel” as the means to extend scientific methods from physiology into psychology. But was and is it possible for psychology as a science to reconcile writing with “all the style of a novel,” and generating “scrupulously true and scientifically analysed fact”? Joseph Grasset claimed both these attributes for his 1890 pedagogical case history of an hysteric, and in this session, we explore ways that narrative has served an important epistemological function in psychology beyond simply that of “spinning stories.”
In this, our session contributes to a growing strand in the history of science which examines narrative as a form of knowing within the modern sciences. Articles in a recent issue of SHPS considered narrative for its role in creating coherence or helping resolve complex scientific problems. We extend this approach to the discipline of scientific psychology across contexts from the subject-focused observations and experiments of late nineteenth-century France and Italy, to the internationalised discipline promoted by twentieth century American textbooks. For if narrative is readily identified in psychological texts—much more so than in some natural sciences, for instance—its presence often sits uneasily with psychologists’ conceptions and defence of their work as science. Hence the surprising effect of Grasset’s play on novelistic style in his case history. Uneasiness with narrative is particularly evident in late twentieth-century psychology, which tends to dismiss narrative as mere storytelling, a shortcut leading scientists away from best practice. The first paper in our session introduces and historicizes these concerns. By reconstructing intersections between storytelling—in data production and analysis—and textbook depictions of psychology as a discipline, Ivan Flis demonstrates the crucial pedagogical role played by narrative and argues for its fundamental function in advancing the always “unfinished” work of contemporary psychologists. Subsequent presentations take up the epistemological questions raised by contemporary narrative knowing and explore how they might be contrasted productively with practices and writings from the beginnings of psychology. David Horn and Kim Hajek notably interrogate how narrative contributed to making scientific knowledge out of observations and experiments on exceptional subjects. Horn focuses on two women subjects who circulated across national and disciplinary boundaries, Léonie Leboulanger and Eusapia Palladino, while Hajek tracks the multiple retellings of the case of a third: Félida X… and her double personality. Each paper explores the ways in which the stories produced by human scientists worked to channel the extraordinary phenomena displayed by these women—by explaining, by re-explaining, and by explaining away. Ultimately, our presentations begin to map out the ways in which narrative has been deployed in the modern science of psychology and why “narrative knowing” might matter to the discipline. Bibliography
David Horn - Narrating the Extraordinary: Léonie Leboulanger, Eusapia Palladino, and the Agency of the Experimental Subject Kim M. Hajek - “Je vais raconter l’histoire d’une jeune femme”: Retelling the Story of Félida X… in Emerging French Psychology Ivan Flis - Storytelling in an Unfinished Science: Replication Crisis and Textbooks as Disciplinary Overviews (1950–2018) |
'NARRATIVE KNOWING - THE FUNCTIONS OF NARRATIVE THAT UNITE AND DISUNITE MODERN KNOWLEDGE' - EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE, LONDON - 14-17 SEPTEMBER 2018
Our papers picked out and highlighted the functions of narrative in modern science, taking in a rich range of case studies that aimed to facilitate broad conclusions. Historians and philosophers of science have already dramatically expanded the range of ways in which knowledge making activities can be described, characterised and understood. Ways of knowing, styles of thought, epistemic things - projects such as these have gathered their own communities of scholars with different versions sometimes competing but more often simply highlighting different aspects of scientific life. Our symposium was dedicated to thinking within these kinds of framework, but also cutting across them, by starting with a particular kind of knowing, that of knowing through narrative, and considering how far this may be a unifying or dis-unifying feature either across the practices of science or within these broader frameworks.
The work of scientists’ narratives in the history of science has not yet received this kind of dedicated attention. While there are key exceptions, Gillian Beer’s work on narrative in Darwinism and John Forrester’s exploration of case studies in medicine foremost amongst them, the time is ripe for this kind of communal effort (as only just begun in the recent issue of SHPS vol. 62 2017). The questions of whether scientific knowing is distinct from other kinds of knowing; and whether narrative knowing in science is different from such forms in the humanities, or in other communities where expert knowledge is found and used, are important questions and were highly relevant to the conference themes of unity and disunity. Our questions addressed this unity issue by undermining those who would see science as distinct from ‘humanistic’ understanding, and by providing rich grounds for a renewed appreciation of scientific research in all its variety, and so new insights into how we know. The five papers explored the functions of narrative in different countries, sciences, contexts, and periods. Dmitriy Myelnikov focused on phage research in soviet Georgia and how narrative was of use to those trying to discern what phage were and explain their actions. Ageliki Lefkaditou considered the transformative potential of the museum setting in communicating historical and contemporary scientific narratives at the intersection of texts, things, spaces and people. Meira Gold explored the roles of contrasting field narratives and visual tools in early twentieth century British Egyptology. Debjani Bhattacharyya, who unfortunately was unable to attend in person because the UK Home Office failed to issue her with a visa in time, nevertheless had her paper read on her behalf, which attended to the recording of shipwrecks and the making of a new narrative knowledge for the purposes of insurance and imperial power. Lastly Dominic Berry considered time and narrative in historical objects. Dmitriy Myelnikov The lively narratives of bacteriophage therapy in Soviet medicine, 1930–1956 Meria Gold Archaeological story-telling: Uses of narrative and visualisation in early 20th century Egyptology Ageliki Lefkaditou Active Encounters: Narratives of Historical and Contemporary Science in Museums Sea of Storms: Narrating Science in Colonial Courts Debjani Bhattacharyya Dominic Berry Narrative burden and object times |
'RÉÉCRITURES ET « SAVOIR NARRATIF » DANS LES RÉCITS PSYCHOLOGIQUES SCIENTIFIQUES' - COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL DE LA SOCIÉTÉ FRANÇAISE POUR L’HISTOIRE DES SCIENCES DE L’HOMME, PARIS - 26-28 SEPTEMBER 2018
Papers:
Nicole Edelman (Paris-Nanterre): Le « cas » Joséphine Hugues revisité de 1865 à 1909 Kim M. Hajek (LSE): Dédoublement de personnalité et multiplication de récits : Réécrire le cas de Félida X… à la fin du XIXe siècle Sigrid Leyssen (IRH-ICUB, University of Bucharest): Re-drawing, Re-viewing and Re-writing Psychology’s Images Symposium abstract: Il serait banal de dire que les récits, au sens de textes de style proprement narratif, sont extrêmement répandus dans l’histoire des sciences humaines, surtout dans ces domaines de savoir qui se regroupent autour de la psychologie « scientifique » de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècles. Si le savoir psychologique s’est construit en grande partie à partir de récits avec « toutes les allures d’un roman », au point où certains, comme le professeur de médecine Joseph Grasset, se sont amusés à amplifier le caractère romanesque de leurs récits de cas, l’on s’est souvent contenté de voir dans le « narratif » une simple question de style, une « allure » à opposer à la substance « réelle » du savoir scientifique. Grasset rassure ses étudiants, par exemple, quant au sérieux de l’histoire qu’il leur présente, qui appartient « en réalité » à la science, étant « un fait scrupuleusement vrai et scientifiquement analysé » (57). Ce symposium a pour but de déjouer cette opposition présumée en interrogeant en quoi le « narratif » favorise l’activité scientifique en psychologie. En cela, nous suivons la voie ouverte récemment par Mary Morgan et Norton Wise qui avancent la notion de « narrative knowing », d’un « savoir narratif » distinct qui fait autant partie de l’explication scientifique du monde naturel que l’élaboration de lois mathématiques, par exemple. Selon Morgan et Wise, « the endemic if not chronic use of narrative in science and its regular recurrence speak to the possibilities of what we like to call ‘narrative knowing’: accounts of phenomena that can only be known, or be best known, via narrative » (4). Dans le présent symposium, nous recherchons les fonctions épistémologiques du « narratif » dans des cas célèbres—récits de cas et cas d’illusion visuelle—dans la psychologie naissante. Etant célèbres ou exemplaires, ces cas se sont prêtés à de nombreuses réécritures et reconfigurations ou, alternativement, ils ont permis la retranscription et la diffusion plus large d’« histoires scientifiques » déjà connus. Chaque réécriture ou rediffusion se situe au croisement d’enjeux épistémologiques particuliers et de choix narratifs distincts. Des années 1870 aux débuts du XXe siècle, de divers savants remobilisent les cas de Joséphine Hugues (violée sous magnétisme) ou de Félida X (dont la personnalité serait « dédoublée ») à des fins théoriques et méthodologiques spécifiques. Analyser les aspects narratifs de leurs textes nous permet d’exposer les convergences et divergences éventuelles entre enjeux épistémologiques et modes de narration, voix narratives, valorisation ou suppression de détails, etc. D’autres cas se voient retranscrits d’un mode de représentation à un autre, tels les illusions fondatrices de la psychologie de la perception ; mises en série, ces images suscitent des expériences narratives chez le spectateur que le psychologue doit ensuite articuler avec des descriptions écrites pour produire son propre récit savant de l’illusion. De même, en intégrant la notion de « temps perdu » dans son œuvre, jusque dans son titre, Proust effectue une retranscription éminemment narrative de cette notion physiologique aux frontières de la mémoire et de la perception ; quelles histoires psychologiques cette réécriture romanesque permet-elle de raconter ? De manière générale, analyser la contribution du narratif aux savoirs scientifiques, n’est-ce que repenser les vieilles oppositions entre savoir scientifique et savoir littéraire, entre forme et fond, entre sciences humaines et sciences nomologiques ? Ou est-ce ouvrir sur de nouvelles manières de comprendre le fonctionnement des sciences modernes ? |
'NARRATIVE TECHNOLOGY - NEW APPROACHES TO THE SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY GATEWAY' - SYMPOSIUM, SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI - 11-14 OCTOBER 2018
If historians of science and technology habitually make and deal in narratives, less often do they consider what narrative is made of, and its roles in knowing and making. The subject of narrative science was the focus of a recent special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (vol. 62, 2017). Within that special issue authors did note that narrative might have important implications for the kinds of material things that scientists deal with, but it was not clear what roles narrative knowledge might play in sites of technology and engineering, or beyond sites immediately identifiable as scientific. Our panel seeks to address this challenge, drawing the notion of narrative knowledge into the history of technology. Each contributor unpacks how narrative knowing is crucial to their case, not only for the purposes of history making, but for historical actors themselves. This is achieved in a number of ways, either by appreciation of narrative epistemology within a historical site, or through an engagement with scholarship in narratology, literary theory, and philosophy of history, or by showing how narrative structures at the historiographical level have directed and shaped broader historical research patterns.
Narrative has the potential to open up the history of technology and central questions at its core. Given the potential breadth of scope, we make the enterprise more manageable by adopting the ‘gateway’ theme of SHOT 2018, focussing on one key gateway, that between histories of science and technology. As with many histories, our case studies refuse to entertain clear distinctions between technical and scientific elements, and so we are able to revisit foundational questions of the relations between science and technology. Rather than merely going back over old tensions, narrative provides a fresh vantage point on these issues and fertile common ground for future integrative work. As an epistemological unit, or as an analytical approach, narrative is not commonly thought of as bound up in materials other than texts, and at the outset, some might be skeptical of the extent to which a notion such as narrative is needed in the history of technology. Our session is innovative because it moves beyond narrative’s role in forms of communication and textual dissemination, to instead investigate its actions and activities in technoscientific practice, in epistemology, and society. In addition, we do not see narrative knowledge as a historiographical competitor with other approaches, or for that matter, as reducible to the historical enterprise itself, in the sense that ‘all histories are stories’. Rather it allows for a potentially productive reconfiguration of technological and scientific epistemologies, on terms that allow us to explore the similarities as well as differences between science, medicine, engineering, and technology. Dominic Berry - Narrative starting points: where to place your fingertips on the history of DNA synthesis Robert Bud - The Industrial Revolution as story, Technology as a key word and Industrial Strategy as policy in 1960s Britain Lijing Jiang - Stories of the “Living Fossil” across the Pacific: Narratives of Evolutionary History and Resource Management in Metasequoia Research Tiago Saraiva - White Writing: Cloning Citrus and Racial Degeneration in South Africa |
'DEVELOPING A PHILOSOPHY OF NARRATIVE IN SCIENCE' - POSTER SESSION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, SEATTLE - 1-4 NOVEMBER 2018
Our poster presentation focused on how narrative is at work in many sciences, operating at various levels of reasoning, performing a wide variety of functions. In some areas uses are habitual, as in the natural historical sciences, but they are also to be found in less likely places: for example as integral with mathematical simulations, or in giving accounts of chemical syntheses. Despite their endemic nature, philosophers of science have not yet given much credence to narrative - either as kind of explanation, type of observational reporting, format of representation, or any of the other purposes to which they can be put. Yet - as is evident in the brief outline below - the usage of narratives carries both ontological implications, and prompts epistemic questions. Our poster introduces the ‘narrative science project’, which is investigating a number of scientific sites to develop a philosophical approach to scientists’ use of narratives within their communities, rather than in their pedagogical or popularising usages. Three questions exemplify the value of admitting narrative into the philosophy of science.
How do candidate laws of nature interact with narrative explanation in natural historical sciences? Laws are traditionally required for explanation in the sciences, but it has been argued that in the natural historical sciences they rather ‘lurk in the background’. Initial project findings suggest that in narrative accounts in these fields, laws might rather ‘patrol’ than ‘lurk’ - to forbid certain narratives and to constrain those that are told without ever quite determining the account. This ‘patrolling’ may function differently with respect to long-term changes than with short-term upheavals - such as found in geology or earth science. But narratives have also been found in situations of disjunctions or gaps in law-based explanations in these historical sciences, or play a bridging or unlocking function between scientists from different fields working together. How do the social, medical, and human sciences rely on co-produced “analytical narratives” in reporting their observational materials? It is quite typical of a range of scientific methods that ‘observations’ consist of individual accounts of feelings or attitudes or beliefs so that data provided comes direct from the ‘subjects’ involved. Often the materials come in the form of anecdotes, small contained narratives, or fragments of longer ones. Our evidence suggests we should treat these as ‘co-produced’ observations, where sometimes the analytical work goes alongside the subject to be reported polyphonically, and at other times the ‘objective analysis’ of the observing scientist is integrated into the self-witnessed, ‘subject-based’, reporting to produce something like ‘analytical observations’. We should consider narrative seriously as an available format of representation in science, worthy of the same philosophical consideration given to models, diagrams, etc. Answers to these questions will rely not just on philosophy but also narrative theory, which help to distinguish narrative and narrating. Such an approach raises a number of issues, for example: Is there a standard plot, or does it vary with discipline? Our poster imagined the narrative plots of chemical synthesis, developmental biology, anthropology, engineered morphology, psychological testimony, and geological time. Participants: Mary S. Morgan Dominic Berry Mat Paskins Kim Hajek Andrew Hopkins |
'WHEN STORIES ARE SCIENCE' - ROUND TABLE SESSION, HISTORY OF SCIENCE SOCIETY, SEATTLE - 1-4 NOVEMBER 2018
All historians of science engage in storytelling. But what about when the science we investigate is itself a science of stories? Examples of narrative abound in natural history, geology, psychology, and in knowledge practices common to many sciences, such as modelling or diagrams. Examining the terrain of HPS from the perspective of ‘narrative’ and ‘non-narrative’ knowledge is a way to read through and between current historiographical approaches, be they institutional, disciplinary, intellectual, or object-centered. Accordingly, our roundtable canvassed a range of approaches to narrative in HPS to ask how a narrative focus can complement or inflect well-established stories about how science works.
Narrative matters because, although it functions in ways comparable to scientific laws and theories, it remains much understudied in the history of science. For instance, to neglect narrative is potentially to miss important ways that scientists join up sets of data or observations, or make use of knowledge from distinct disciplinary domains. A ‘narrative knowing’ perspective also opens up deeper connections between the forms of scientific communication and their content; it thereby offers an exciting opportunity to engage deeply with scholarship in the more literary humanities. The presentations in this roundtable traversed territories from early modern botany, through Darwinism and nineteenth-century French psychology, to engineering biology and contemporary medicine. As a group, together with our audience, we worked through convergences and divergences in how narrative has mattered for science, and where narrative might lead us from here. Participants Kim Hajek Dominic Berry Ian Hesketh Miriam Solomon Anna Svensson |
'SCIENTISTS’ NARRATIVES' - SYMPOSIUM, HISTORY OF SCIENCE SOCIETY, SEATTLE - 1-4 NOVEMBER 2018
Historians of science have recognised that scientists use narrative in many different fields and different domains - not just in the most obvious domains of the natural historical sciences, or in development stories, but in accounting for reactions, in describing mechanisms, in making sense out of simulations, in piecing together complex social and ecological arrangements, and so forth. Historians have also paid attention to the ways narratives feature in how scientific work is communicated. This symposium investigates how scientists use narrative not just to structure their practices (of hypothesising, observing, and inferring), but in constituting the objects of their science. At this deeper level, we see how scientists’ make use of narrative in the realm of concept formation: that is, in framing, expounding, clarifying, justifying, and then developing, the concepts they create and use. Our research suggests that such narratives of concept formation are broadly as well as deeply based: they may be built upon empirical research problems, developed out of theoretical puzzles, emerge from attempts to make causal sense out of events, or to account for strange phenomena.
The individual symposium papers consider the role of narrative in two late 19th century cases: Darwin’s use of narrative in developing the theoretical concepts of evolution and economists’ use of narratives to characterize their competing concepts of utility; and two mid 20th century examples where narratives are involved in developing the concepts of genes in development and the taxonomies of neuroscience. Participants: Mary S. Morgan Robert Meunier Greg Priest Corinne Bloch-Mullins |
QUEERING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: A LUNCHTIME PUBLIC LECTURE ON NARRATIVE, SCIENCE, AND NONCONFORMITY - 21 FEBRUARY 2019
In what ways do our ideas about science, what it is, how it works, and who does it, need to change in recognition of LGBTQ+ lives? The history of science in public is still often told as male, white, able-bodied, and heterosexual. This does not reflect reality as evidenced by expanding historical and sociological scholarship, which in recent years has begun to incorporate insights from trans studies and queer theory, creating frameworks and findings that matter for the broadest histories of science, technology, and medicine. In recognition of these exciting and important developments, and with the aim of directly bringing them to broader audiences, this lunchtime lecture invites you to engage with scholars currently exploring and integrating these questions.
To organise our thoughts, we also reflect in particular on the importance of narrative for the historical, philosophical, and sociological investigation of science. This angle builds on the expertise of the Narrative Science project, which aims to uncover narrative's importance and epistemic functions in the history and philosophy of science. How is narrative implicated in, for instance, scientific objects held by the Science Museum? In biological ideas of homosexuality? New understandings of transgender health? These particular questions reflect the expertise of our three speakers: |
Time: 12:00-13:00
Location: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE campus
Accessibility: Easy wheelchair access directly from the street on Aldwych. Lecture hall is on the ground floor. A hearing loop will be in place.
This is a public lecture and all are very welcome. Registration is not essential (you can bring people in at last minute) but to help with planning, if you are expecting to attend, please do register via the Eventbrite page.
As part of LGBT history month we are pleased to organise this lunchtime lecture in collaboration with Spectrum, the representative network for LSE LGBTQ+ staff. This lecture is one of a number of events that are happening as part of LGBT History Month this February. Further details can be found at: https://info.lse.ac.uk/staff/divisions/equity-diversity-and-inclusion/Staff-networks/Spectrum/News-and-events
Location: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE campus
Accessibility: Easy wheelchair access directly from the street on Aldwych. Lecture hall is on the ground floor. A hearing loop will be in place.
This is a public lecture and all are very welcome. Registration is not essential (you can bring people in at last minute) but to help with planning, if you are expecting to attend, please do register via the Eventbrite page.
As part of LGBT history month we are pleased to organise this lunchtime lecture in collaboration with Spectrum, the representative network for LSE LGBTQ+ staff. This lecture is one of a number of events that are happening as part of LGBT History Month this February. Further details can be found at: https://info.lse.ac.uk/staff/divisions/equity-diversity-and-inclusion/Staff-networks/Spectrum/News-and-events
Ellie Armstrong (she/her) is a PhD candidate at UCL looking at what a queer feminist critique can bring to understanding how science is displayed in science museums. She is the recent organiser of ‘Queering the Science Museum’ a tour series that explored how queer theory could be practiced in the museum. |
Ross Brooks (he/him) is a doctoral student at the Centre for Medical Humanities, Oxford Brookes University. His project is entitled ‘Evolution’s Closet: The New Biology and Homosexuality in Britain, 1871-1967’ and is fully funded by the Wellcome Trust. He has published several articles on queer themes in history of biology in leading HSTM journals including Archives of Natural History and Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Ross also pursues a sideline in Oxford’s queer history, most recently curating a new app-based city trail to accompany the No Offence: Exploring LGBTQ+ Histories exhibition at the Ashmolean.
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Dr. Michael Toze (he/him) is a Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Care at the University of Lincoln. His research focuses upon ageing, health and LGBT experiences, and particularly the experiences of trans people. He is the author of ‘The Risky Womb and the Unthinkability of the Pregnant Man’, and ‘Developing a Critical Trans Gerontology’. |
'EXPLORATION THROUGH REWRITING: NARRATIVE KNOWING IN THE “PSY” SCIENCES' PANEL AT SDN ANNUAL CONFERENCE - 8-10 APRIL 2019
How and when does narrative play an epistemic role in scientific activity? Scholars in French Studies are well placed to explore the contours of such “narrative knowing”—a topic of increasing interest to historians of the modern sciences. In this panel, we examined the epistemic function of narrative in the “psy” sciences of nineteenth-century France, specifically in instances when savants, physicians or novelists engaged in practises of rewriting. As psychological or psychiatric case histories spread—from patient to physician-observer, to philosophers or psychologists—and came to incorporate concepts from other scientific domains, their narrative form underwent various reconfigurations. The narrative focalisation might shift, for instance, between a focus on the patient’s experiences and one on symptoms. Similarly, cases could be inscribed in a range of generic forms: scientific observations, reports in medical periodicals, novels. Rather than considering these textual transformations purely as a matter of style, papers in this panel analysed their contribution to making sense of “psy” phenomena. What avenues of psychiatric enquiry were furthered or closed off as psychiatrists retranscribed their patients’ stories into publishable case histories? How did the choice and ordering of concrete details articulate with different ways of explaining the apparently doubled personality of Félida X? And what kinds of psychological and literary exploration follow from Proust’s reconfiguration of the physiological notion of “temps perdu” into his literary “case”? In mapping forms of narrative knowing in the long nineteenth century, our papers also ultimately highlighted the productive contribution of a “French Studies approach” to enquiry in the histories of science and medicine.
Explanation and Exemplarity: Retelling the Case of Félida X in the Medical and Popular Press
Kim M. Hajek – LSE
Exploring or Appropriating the Patients’ View? The Multiple (Re)writings of First-hand Narratives of Madness
Aude Fauvel – Institut des humanités en médecine (Lausanne Hospital/University of Lausanne)
A la recherche du « temps perdu » helmholtzien chez Proust
Larry Duffy – University of Kent
Explanation and Exemplarity: Retelling the Case of Félida X in the Medical and Popular Press
Kim M. Hajek – LSE
Exploring or Appropriating the Patients’ View? The Multiple (Re)writings of First-hand Narratives of Madness
Aude Fauvel – Institut des humanités en médecine (Lausanne Hospital/University of Lausanne)
A la recherche du « temps perdu » helmholtzien chez Proust
Larry Duffy – University of Kent
'WRITING THE HUMAN SCIENCES: TEXTUAL ORGANIZATION, COLLABORATION, INTERDISCIPLINARITY' SYMPOSIUM AT CHEIRON CONFERENCE, EDMONTON - 20-23 JUNE 2019
This panel explored writing practices across the human sciences, in order to examine how these disciplines produce broader knowledge out of particular chunks of information. In doing so, we aim to expand on recent scholarly enquiry into ordering and explanatory practices across the sciences, including work on case-based science, on narrative forms of knowing, and on collaborative science, by bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to bear on these questions. Our panel not only fosters interdisciplinarity by drawing its case-studies from across the human sciences—French psychology of personality in the 1870s and 1880s, Durkheimian sociology at the fin de siècle, and mid-twentieth-century anthropological work on Bali—but, importantly, each case-study captures a moment of exchange or collaboration between disciplines. They allow us to interrogate the way writing practices from one discipline—as both practical working methods and as textual detail on the page—informed scholarly work in another area, and conversely, what emerging research strands gained from modifying existing conventions.
Two broad themes structure our enquiry and provide points of comparison between the three papers: the role of collaboration in human-scientific writing, and the organization of research materials into scholarly publications, both on the broad level of journals and on the fine level of individual articles. Barberis examines how existing models for scholarly journals in the année mode influenced the organization of Durkheim’s Année sociologique, and thus shaped the growing institutionalization of sociology in France. What forms of knowledge were promoted by collaborative working methods in the Durkheim group, or by the pairing of a philosopher and a physician to evaluate cases of amnesia and their psychological import in the late 1870s? Hajek's and Sullivan's papers notably turn on analyses of narrative techniques and the ways they serve to order particular scholarly material—to group “analogous” cases around that of the celebrated Félida X. and thus to claim them for emerging scientific psychology, and to combine written and visual material in Gregory Bateson’s studies of Balinese character. Regarding Bateson, a key question is how the narrative organization of his articles reflects his shift to a cybernetic orientation, and away from psychological theorizing. Each of our case-studies is enmeshed in its particular discursive and institutional context; nonetheless, by bringing them into conversation, this panel traces some concrete ways in which interdisciplinarity (and disciplinary differentiation) are written into the organization and narration of human-scientific knowledge.
Papers:
A Journal as a Moral Community: The Case of the Année sociologique.
Dr Daniela S. Barberis, Shimer Great Books School, North Central College
Analogous Cases in Nineteenth-Century French Psychology: Narrating and Evaluating Double Personality.
Dr Kim M. Hajek, LSE
From Fear to a Steady State: Gregory Bateson’s Narratives of Bali as an Anticipation of the Double-bind.
Dr Gerald Sullivan, Collin College
Two broad themes structure our enquiry and provide points of comparison between the three papers: the role of collaboration in human-scientific writing, and the organization of research materials into scholarly publications, both on the broad level of journals and on the fine level of individual articles. Barberis examines how existing models for scholarly journals in the année mode influenced the organization of Durkheim’s Année sociologique, and thus shaped the growing institutionalization of sociology in France. What forms of knowledge were promoted by collaborative working methods in the Durkheim group, or by the pairing of a philosopher and a physician to evaluate cases of amnesia and their psychological import in the late 1870s? Hajek's and Sullivan's papers notably turn on analyses of narrative techniques and the ways they serve to order particular scholarly material—to group “analogous” cases around that of the celebrated Félida X. and thus to claim them for emerging scientific psychology, and to combine written and visual material in Gregory Bateson’s studies of Balinese character. Regarding Bateson, a key question is how the narrative organization of his articles reflects his shift to a cybernetic orientation, and away from psychological theorizing. Each of our case-studies is enmeshed in its particular discursive and institutional context; nonetheless, by bringing them into conversation, this panel traces some concrete ways in which interdisciplinarity (and disciplinary differentiation) are written into the organization and narration of human-scientific knowledge.
Papers:
A Journal as a Moral Community: The Case of the Année sociologique.
Dr Daniela S. Barberis, Shimer Great Books School, North Central College
Analogous Cases in Nineteenth-Century French Psychology: Narrating and Evaluating Double Personality.
Dr Kim M. Hajek, LSE
From Fear to a Steady State: Gregory Bateson’s Narratives of Bali as an Anticipation of the Double-bind.
Dr Gerald Sullivan, Collin College
'FIGURES FOR THE HUMAN SCIENCES' PANEL AT ESHHS ANNUAL CONFERENCE, BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - 4-6 JULY 2019
When we think about “figures” of importance in the history of the human sciences, names like Wundt or Durkheim tend to come to mind. In this panel, however, another kind of figure claims our attention for its role in the generation and reception of human-scientific knowledge: the rhetorical, or stylistic figure—of which our play on “figure” in these two sentences is one small example. That such figures bear epistemological and ontological weight was a major tenet of the so-called rhetorical/linguistic turn in the history of science. More recently, scholars have reopened another theme of the linguistic turn, analysing the organising and explanatory functions of narrative in scientific activity (e.g. Morgan & Wise, 2017). Our panel takes the questions raised by “narrative science” as an opportunity to re-examine the work done by particular figures of style across the human sciences, and thus to explore how that work articulates with narrative forms of knowing. A focus on figures additionally prompts more explicit consideration of reader participation in producing scientific narratives and scientific meaning—whether through the ways figures invite an imaginative response (from an implied reader), or the ways (actual) reader reception in some historical/cultural context inflects scientific debates. Are explanatory narratives constructed in part from a set of stylistic figures? If so, to what extent is a given figure or its imaginative possibilities, rather than the narrative as a whole, crucial to making meaning from human-scientific phenomena? Under what conditions—historical, cultural, textual—do the implications of a particular figure destabilise narratives already circulating in scientific discourse? And is there a trade-off between the potential for a figure to be misconstrued and its capacity to open up unconventional meanings?
If these questions frame our panel on a broad scholarly level, individual papers engage with them more or less explicitly. What directly unites our contributions is a concern to unpack the functions—epistemological, ontological, rhetorical, or (just) amusing—of one particular figure in a contained discursive context. This provides us with the depth to study our chosen figure in detail, while the range of our four papers provides the breadth to draw larger conclusions. Our panel’s diversity firstly arises from our adopting a loose definition of a stylistic figure; we study metaphor, code-switching, indirect discourse, and accumulation—expressive effects that are often carved up in rhetorical or literary studies. Similarly, our case-studies range across human sciences from physiology to psychoanalysis, and from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century. Among this diversity, two major functions emerge: firstly, the role of stylistic figures in providing linguistic access to the interior workings of human mental processes, and in “translating” those processes into the communicative realm of scientific activity; and secondly, the way figures help to constitute a domain of enquiry or set of practitioners as scientific. Thus, metaphor proved a descriptive resource for Freud, as well as a rich tool in his struggles to transfer his clinical experience into scientific theories c.a. 1914–20, as discussed by Shann. Some years earlier, it was the inner experience of emotion that Vytautas Civinskis, who had attended some of Wundt’s lectures, tried to carry across into language. In Civinskis’s case the translation was literal, as Almonaitienė and Girininkaitė show; the recourse to code-switching between multiple languages is a major stylistic feature of his reflections. Questions around constructing science link the final two papers, as Hajek and Levinson explore how stylistic figures helped, respectively, to form a Durkheimian view of sociological science, and naturalize “resuscitation” in a world that wasn’t finished with “miracles,” both in texts which also served other rhetorical/epistemic purposes. Specifically, Hajek interrogates the use of indirect discourse and resulting shifts in narratorial distance in book reviews in the early years of the Année sociologique, while Levinson closes the panel by investigating the accumulation of singular narratives about the uncertainty of signs of death, as they were translated and collected by Bruhier d’Ablaincourt and received by mid-18th-century French readers. Papers: Metaphor and Narrative in Freud. Jonathan Shann, UCL, UK Epistemological Function of Code-Switching in a Multilingual Text: The Case of the Student Vytautas Civinskis’ Multilingual Diaries. Junona S. Almonaitienė, Department of Health Psychology, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Veronika Girininkaitė, Vilnius University Library & Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, Lithuania Indirect Discourse, Narrator Distance and Sociological Knowledge in the Early Years of the Année sociologique (1896–1900). Kim M. Hajek, LSE, UK Repetition of the singular and accumulation of the exceptional in Jacques-Jean Bruhier D’Ablaincourt’s (1742)Dissertation sur l’Incertitude des signes de la mort et l’abus des enterremens et Embaumens précipités. Sharman Levinson, Université d’Angers & The American University of Paris, France |
'NEW NARRATIVES IN THE HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCIAL STUDY OF BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING' PANEL AT ISHPSSB CONFERENCE, OSLO - 7-12 JULY 2019
This panel highlights new approaches in the history, philosophy and social study of biological engineering. Emphasising the need for interdisciplinary investigation and interpretation of such areas, we draw together historians, philosophers, and social scientists studying biological engineering across CRISPR, 'Genome Project write', and in the making of biotech itself. We corral these different approaches through reflection on, or by attending to, narrative as an epistemic tool or way of knowing available to scientists and engineers in our cases, and the uses to which narrative is there put. Our results can therefore be read in light of broader debates and discussions currently being had throughout HPS and STS, aspects of which can be found here www.narrative-science.org
In recent years historians, philosophers and sociologists of biology have, for various reasons, come to take engineering more seriously either as a professional group that interacts with and collaborates with biology, or as offering a distinctive epistemic approach to biological materials and questions. One way in which to push these discussions further, and better integrate them with mainstream histories and philosophies of science, is to consider what cases of biological engineering can teach us about narrative science. Some of the functions narrative has already been found to achieve in other sciences include ordering knowledge, classifying and categorizing it, offering additional tools of representation, and ways of drawing out explanations. Our panel builds on these kinds of foundation. Dominic Berry- Biotech as Genre Janella Baxter- How the narrative of engineering in biology creates epistemic divides Robert Smith- How do you get a project off the ground? Narrating and enacting value in synthetic biology |
'SCIENCE AS NARRATIVE: CASES FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AND GEOLOGY' PANEL AT HSTM NETWORK IRELAND ANNUAL CONFERENCE - 18-20 OCTOBER 2019
We address the epistemic work that narrative accomplishes for scientists in the pursuit of science. While the importance of narrative as a literary form is already well developed, evidenced in the growth of studies intersecting science and literature, and the importance of narrative for wider receptions of science and in pedagogy is also clear, our analysis is more specific. We focus on narrative as a way of knowing, one that contributes to epistemic debate, or functions as a means for tackling problems, reaching conclusions, and so on. After an introduction, two papers provide examples from evolutionary biology and geology respectively.
Introduction: Narrative science for histories of science
Dominic Berry, London School of Economics
If the motivations and aims of the ongoing Narrative Science project are only glanced at, one might overlook its novelty and potential. While the range of features that historians of science and technology attend to in their cases continues to expand, our panel makes a case for a fresh look at narrative, from the perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science, for reasons more specific than a glance allows. We make this case in full knowledge of the importance that historians already attach to narrative, at least of their own historical narratives if not necessarily of analysis of narrative itself. We also make this case in full knowledge of the lively and expansive field of scholarship intersecting histories of science and literature, which we have learnt from and aim to contribute to. In contrast with these existing interests, it would be fair to conceive of the Narrative Science project as tackling aspects of narrative that are decidedly narrower. They are certainly more specific. But this specificity is the project’s strength, enabling historians to travel deeper into parts of their cases they might otherwise overlook, find connections between elements otherwise apparently unconnected, develop interdisciplinary connections between fields that might otherwise be alienated from one another, and - considered from a present-centred perspective - all in ways that take a robust stance on behalf of narrative’s ability to contribute to and constitute knowledge.
Darwin’s Queer Plots: Sex beyond Selection in The Descent of Man (1871)
Ross Brooks, Oxford Brookes University
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex is well known to contain Charles Darwin’s lengthiest exposition of his second great theory after natural selection, sexual selection. Historians of biology, most recently Evelleen Richards, have argued that Darwin framed the theory in resolutely heteronormative terms; indeed, Darwin’s construal of “nature’s courtship plot” (Ruth Bernard Yeazell) based on stereotyped notions of aggressive males and fussy females has been foundational in the development of a vibrant scholarship on the functions of narrative in science and literature (see, for example, Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots). Questions remain, however, about how Darwin broached sex variations—intersexualities, transformations of sex, and non-reproductive sexual behaviours—which fell outside Descent’s principal courtship plot, a situation which this paper aims to address. It will explore the role of narrative in Darwin’s text as he sought to align his idealised construal of sexual selection with his commitment to the principle of primordial hermaphroditism (dual-sexed origins). The paper will also discuss his handling of the sexual mores and behaviours of indigenous peoples (“savages”). Despite constituting some of the most overt references to non-reproductive sexual behaviours in Descent, Darwin situated the sex lives of such peoples in a highly restrictive narrative of civilizational teleology. Reflecting on these and other queer aspects of Descent, the paper will offer new insights on the range of strategies that Darwin deployed in order to manage subjects which might have brought his book into confrontation with prevailing standards of Victorian gender and sexual respectability.
Competing Narratives: The Continental Drift Debate of the Early 20th Century
Andrew Hopkins, London School of Economics
The translation of Alfred Wegener’s The Origin of Continents and Oceans into English in 1924 provoked a backlash from much of the Anglophone geological community, particularly in the USA. Wegener’s proposal that the continents had been in motion, separating and colliding over geological time threatened the existing view that they were fixed, permanent entities. To many, this so-called mobilist view seemed to constitute a more coherent and parsimonious position than the fixist perspective. For example, the anomalous distribution of certain fossil fauna and flora had previously been explained by invoking the ad hoc existence of ephemeral land bridges between continents. Continental mobilism on the other hand had the ability to explain biotic anomalies as well as a number of other puzzling geological phenomena such as how and why mountain chains form and how rocks deposited in a tropical climate could now be located in polar regions. Ultimately however, although Wegener’s arguments found cautious acceptance in many places, they failed to achieve a consensus among American geologists, and continental drift sunk into oblivion in the USA until it re-emerged in a different guise in the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s. This talk will review the main arguments and key personalities on both sides of a debate in which each camp constructed and defended its own narratives of earth history in order to account for the same observations. By reconstructing these competing narratives and making them explicit I will seek to expose the underlying assumptions and prejudices on each side.
Introduction: Narrative science for histories of science
Dominic Berry, London School of Economics
If the motivations and aims of the ongoing Narrative Science project are only glanced at, one might overlook its novelty and potential. While the range of features that historians of science and technology attend to in their cases continues to expand, our panel makes a case for a fresh look at narrative, from the perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science, for reasons more specific than a glance allows. We make this case in full knowledge of the importance that historians already attach to narrative, at least of their own historical narratives if not necessarily of analysis of narrative itself. We also make this case in full knowledge of the lively and expansive field of scholarship intersecting histories of science and literature, which we have learnt from and aim to contribute to. In contrast with these existing interests, it would be fair to conceive of the Narrative Science project as tackling aspects of narrative that are decidedly narrower. They are certainly more specific. But this specificity is the project’s strength, enabling historians to travel deeper into parts of their cases they might otherwise overlook, find connections between elements otherwise apparently unconnected, develop interdisciplinary connections between fields that might otherwise be alienated from one another, and - considered from a present-centred perspective - all in ways that take a robust stance on behalf of narrative’s ability to contribute to and constitute knowledge.
Darwin’s Queer Plots: Sex beyond Selection in The Descent of Man (1871)
Ross Brooks, Oxford Brookes University
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex is well known to contain Charles Darwin’s lengthiest exposition of his second great theory after natural selection, sexual selection. Historians of biology, most recently Evelleen Richards, have argued that Darwin framed the theory in resolutely heteronormative terms; indeed, Darwin’s construal of “nature’s courtship plot” (Ruth Bernard Yeazell) based on stereotyped notions of aggressive males and fussy females has been foundational in the development of a vibrant scholarship on the functions of narrative in science and literature (see, for example, Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots). Questions remain, however, about how Darwin broached sex variations—intersexualities, transformations of sex, and non-reproductive sexual behaviours—which fell outside Descent’s principal courtship plot, a situation which this paper aims to address. It will explore the role of narrative in Darwin’s text as he sought to align his idealised construal of sexual selection with his commitment to the principle of primordial hermaphroditism (dual-sexed origins). The paper will also discuss his handling of the sexual mores and behaviours of indigenous peoples (“savages”). Despite constituting some of the most overt references to non-reproductive sexual behaviours in Descent, Darwin situated the sex lives of such peoples in a highly restrictive narrative of civilizational teleology. Reflecting on these and other queer aspects of Descent, the paper will offer new insights on the range of strategies that Darwin deployed in order to manage subjects which might have brought his book into confrontation with prevailing standards of Victorian gender and sexual respectability.
Competing Narratives: The Continental Drift Debate of the Early 20th Century
Andrew Hopkins, London School of Economics
The translation of Alfred Wegener’s The Origin of Continents and Oceans into English in 1924 provoked a backlash from much of the Anglophone geological community, particularly in the USA. Wegener’s proposal that the continents had been in motion, separating and colliding over geological time threatened the existing view that they were fixed, permanent entities. To many, this so-called mobilist view seemed to constitute a more coherent and parsimonious position than the fixist perspective. For example, the anomalous distribution of certain fossil fauna and flora had previously been explained by invoking the ad hoc existence of ephemeral land bridges between continents. Continental mobilism on the other hand had the ability to explain biotic anomalies as well as a number of other puzzling geological phenomena such as how and why mountain chains form and how rocks deposited in a tropical climate could now be located in polar regions. Ultimately however, although Wegener’s arguments found cautious acceptance in many places, they failed to achieve a consensus among American geologists, and continental drift sunk into oblivion in the USA until it re-emerged in a different guise in the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s. This talk will review the main arguments and key personalities on both sides of a debate in which each camp constructed and defended its own narratives of earth history in order to account for the same observations. By reconstructing these competing narratives and making them explicit I will seek to expose the underlying assumptions and prejudices on each side.
'CONTEXTUALIZING MECHANISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BIOLOGY: VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURES OF DESCRIPTION, NARRATIVE, AND COOPERATION' SYMPOSIUM AT EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE CONFERENCE, BOLOGNA - 31 AUG-3 SEPT 2020
Organised by Hanna Lucia Worliczek and Dominic Berry.
The rise and growth of mechanistic thought and explanation has been a central theme in the historiography of biology in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. However, this historiography often treats mechanism and mechanistic thought as a distinct and distinguishable element within biology, one which was more or less uniform, and which possessed its own momentum. By contrast, a contextualist approach finds mechanism to have been co-extensive with a host of other developments and practices in biology that were occurring simultaneously. Putting mechanism in its place requires attention to its relationships with other elements of biological practice, theory, and representation. In this panel we particularly reflect on the importance of descriptive biology, narrative science, experimental interventionism, and interdisciplinary cooperation. All four papers speak to mechanism, and by placing it in association with these additional elements, have the capacity to change our appreciation of what mechanism did to and for biology.
Our four cases span molecular, cellular, and organismal mechanistic scales, each addressing biological phenomena that fostered multi-disciplinary attention. All four adopt the approach of integrated history and philosophy of science in order to bring to life the epistemic questions faced by historical actors, and offer more or less appropriate terms in which to understand their philosophical and historical significance. For each of us, the recognition that mechanism and mechanistic thought mattered for our actors is a starting point, one which might then: mask significant differences between approaches to mechanism (Berry); or overshadow elements of research that have been underappreciated (Worliczek); or supply a meeting point for cooperative scientific practices which test biology’s universality (Schürch); or help scientists productively manage partial accounts of unique events (Bonnin).
“Merely descriptive” and therefore dismissed? Descriptive epistemic practices of modern cell biology in the context of evolving mechanistic-explanatory demands and innovative imaging technologies after 1950.
Dr. Hanna Lucia Worliczek, University of Vienna
Department of History
Mechanisms or nature narratives? Erwin Chargaff on DNA-protein binding
Dr Dominic Berry, London School of Economics
Narrative Science
Ascidians and urine: on the materiality of mechanism research
Caterina Schürch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
History of Science
Narrative vs. mechanistic explanations of the origin of eukaryotes
Thomas Bonnin, Université de Bordeaux
Centre Emile Durkheim
Commentator
Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics
Narrative Science
Chair
Dr Mathias Grote, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
The rise and growth of mechanistic thought and explanation has been a central theme in the historiography of biology in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. However, this historiography often treats mechanism and mechanistic thought as a distinct and distinguishable element within biology, one which was more or less uniform, and which possessed its own momentum. By contrast, a contextualist approach finds mechanism to have been co-extensive with a host of other developments and practices in biology that were occurring simultaneously. Putting mechanism in its place requires attention to its relationships with other elements of biological practice, theory, and representation. In this panel we particularly reflect on the importance of descriptive biology, narrative science, experimental interventionism, and interdisciplinary cooperation. All four papers speak to mechanism, and by placing it in association with these additional elements, have the capacity to change our appreciation of what mechanism did to and for biology.
Our four cases span molecular, cellular, and organismal mechanistic scales, each addressing biological phenomena that fostered multi-disciplinary attention. All four adopt the approach of integrated history and philosophy of science in order to bring to life the epistemic questions faced by historical actors, and offer more or less appropriate terms in which to understand their philosophical and historical significance. For each of us, the recognition that mechanism and mechanistic thought mattered for our actors is a starting point, one which might then: mask significant differences between approaches to mechanism (Berry); or overshadow elements of research that have been underappreciated (Worliczek); or supply a meeting point for cooperative scientific practices which test biology’s universality (Schürch); or help scientists productively manage partial accounts of unique events (Bonnin).
“Merely descriptive” and therefore dismissed? Descriptive epistemic practices of modern cell biology in the context of evolving mechanistic-explanatory demands and innovative imaging technologies after 1950.
Dr. Hanna Lucia Worliczek, University of Vienna
Department of History
Mechanisms or nature narratives? Erwin Chargaff on DNA-protein binding
Dr Dominic Berry, London School of Economics
Narrative Science
Ascidians and urine: on the materiality of mechanism research
Caterina Schürch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
History of Science
Narrative vs. mechanistic explanations of the origin of eukaryotes
Thomas Bonnin, Université de Bordeaux
Centre Emile Durkheim
Commentator
Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics
Narrative Science
Chair
Dr Mathias Grote, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
'AN ANTHOLOGY OF NARRATIVE SCIENCE' SYMPOSIUM AT EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF TOULOUSE - 14-18 SEPT 2020
Discussants include Mary S. Morgan, Mat Paskins, Sharon Crasnow and Claudia Cristalli. Find the programme book here.