Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Science as (Historical) Narrative

  • Published:
Erkenntnis Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The traditional mode of explanation in physics via deduction from partial differential equations is contrasted here with explanation via simulations. I argue that the different technologies employed constitute different languages, which support different sorts of narratives. The narratives that accompany simulations and articulate their meaning are typically historical or natural historical in kind. They explain complex phenomena by growing them rather than by referring them to general laws. Examples of such growth simulations and growth narratives come from the evolution of wave functions in quantum chaos, snowflake formation, and Etruscan genetics. The examples suggest a few concluding remarks on historical explanation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In reflecting on the relation of technologies to narratives I am inspired directly by the recent works of Mary Morgan on the way narrative functions in the use of models by economists (Morgan 2001, 2007). More generally, I have long followed the works of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, for example, his thoughts on Historiality, Narration, and Reflection (1997, ch. 11): “Experimental systems contain remnants of older narratives as well as shreds and traces of narratives that have not yet been related” (p. 186). They are “generators of epistemic novelty” (p. 229). Other relevant sources, on narrative structure in evolution, primatology, and mathematics, are (Beer 1983; Haraway 1989; Alexander 2002), although they are primarily concerned with how structures of scientific understanding express broader cultural narratives.

  2. Although Berman wants to employ his views on language as a defense against postmodern historicist relativism, much of his discussion does not depend on that perspective. A key source, and foil, for Berman is (Ong 1982).

  3. For an account of the historical significance of this move from microscopic to macroscopic analysis for British physics, see (Smith and Wise 1989, pp. 149–168). It was critically important for such diverse areas as electrostatics (Green), the wave theory of light (MacCullagh), elastic solids (Stokes), and electromagnetic theory (Maxwell).

  4. Fourier’s own rationale for this procedure was by no means standard. Poisson (1835) devoted an entire book to challenging its validity.

  5. Courant and Hilbert (1953, pp. 69–73). For physical applications, they refer the reader to “elementary texts” (p. 4, n.1). The convergence proof for piecewise continuous functions was given by Dirichlet in 1829 (1889) and (1837).

  6. Discussion and references in (Smith and Wise 1989, pp. 192–194). Thomson may not yet have been familiar with Dirichlet’s work on convergence.

  7. In “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Morgan (2007) illuminates how the apparently poverty-stricken 2 × 2 matrix for the famous dilemma acquires a rich and varied set of meanings through the stories with which economists surround and interpret it.

  8. Laughlin and Pines (2000) cite this situation and give a polemical critique of deductive and reductive quantum mechanics in their manifesto for the twenty-first century, arguing that a fundamentally different approach is required to deal with the complex systems of everyday life and their emergent properties. They call this new physics the study of “complex adaptive matter” (p. 30). They and their collaborators extend the analysis to mesoscopic systems, including bio-molecular systems, in (Laughlin et al. 2000).

  9. Heller and Tomsovic (1993). On the place of this work within trends in the physics of complexity see Wise and Brock (1998).

  10. Biologists will insist that the process is not properly called evolution but only development. No doubt they are correct, but I will maintain the authors’ broader usage here and below as an indication of their biological orientation.

  11. Lorraine Daston has recently made me aware of an earlier exception (Hellmann et al. 1893). See Daston et al. (2007, pp. 148–155).

  12. Even the Big Bang theory and evolution of the cosmos appear not to have turned elementary particles into historical objects, presumably because they are not known by evolutionary means.

  13. A better analogy might be the growth of many different kinds of tissues from a single kind of stem cell. Laughlin et al. (2000) also invoke “evolution” (p. 35)—along with growth (p. 32), aging (pp. 32, 34), and adaptation (as in complex adaptive matter, or behavior, p. 36)—to capture the analogy of physical to biological processes. Indeed they offer the hint that the phenomenon of protection (independence of a mesoscopic physical system from small changes in microscopic structure or laws) may in biology “arise from the necessity of tolerating diversity.”

  14. Explanations of this kind are not so surprising for simulations in field sciences like geology, but the point is the same: simulations often explain by supporting natural histories and their narratives (Oreskes 2007).

  15. Hempel’s brief discussions of “historic-genetic” or simply “genetic” explanation (Hempel 1965b, pp. 447–453; Hempel 2001, pp. 287–289), by which he referred to an account of an event by tracing its origins, or genesis, might seem promising for narratives and simulations, but Hempel quickly reduced any valid genetic explanation to a sequence of stages connected by nomological explanation, perhaps combined with description.

  16. This despite Danto’s explicit belief that he represented the historicizing “revolution” initiated by Thomas Kuhn and Norman Hanson against the Hempelian view of science (Danto 1985, p. xi). The revolution, however, did not stress science as narrative, nor did it attack deduction as explanation. It did insist that observation is always theory-dominated and subject to interpretation, which can be seen as introducing a narrative thrust, especially in history of science.

  17. See, however, Ricoeur’s brief reference to explanations in “cosmology, geology, and biology” and certain parts of history as explanations in which retrodiction is at work to establish necessary conditions for something to have happened but prediction based on sufficient conditions is not possible (Ricoeur 1984, 135).

  18. I leave out of account the belief of the Annales school that social history, because quantitative and employing mathematical models, is scientific rather than narrative, which is precisely the dichotomy I am rejecting.

References

  • Alexander, A. R. (2002). Geometrical landscapes: The Voyages of discovery and the transformation of mathematical practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beatty, J. (1995). The evolutionary contingency thesis. In: G. Wolters and J. G. Lennox, in collaboration with P. McLaughlin (Eds.), Concepts, theories, and rationality in the biological sciences (pp. 45–81). Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz; Pittsburgh: University Pittsburgh Press.

  • Beatty, J. (2002). The historicity of nature? Everything that is might have been different? In R. E. Auxier & L. E. Hahn (Eds.), The philosophy of Marjorie Greene (pp. 397–416). Chicago: Open Court.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beatty, J. (2006). Replaying life’s tape. The Journal of Philosophy, 103, 336–362.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beer, G. (1983). Darwin’s plots: Evolutionary narratives in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Belle, E. M. S., Ramakrishnan, U., Mountain, J. L., & Barbujani, G. (2006). Serial coalescent simulations suggest a weak genealogical relationship between Etruscans and modern Tuscans [Electronic Version]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 8012–8017. doi:10.1073/pnas.0509718103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bentley, W. A., & Humphreys, W. J. (1931). Snow crystals. New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berman, R. (2007). Fiction sets you free: Literature, liberty, and western culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carr, D. (1986). Time, narrative, and history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carr, D. (2008). Narrative explanation and its malcontents. History and Theory, 47, 19–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Costelloe, T (2003, winter). Giambattista Vico. In: E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved 3 April 2011 from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2003/entries/vico/. I cite Costelloe’s analysis of Giambattista Vico, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae originibus eruenda librir tres (1710), 52.

  • Courant, R., & Hilbert, D. (1953). Methods of mathematical physics, vol 2. Original published 1924–1928. Berlin: Springer. English edition, revised, London: Interscience.

  • Creager, A. N. H., Lunbeck, E., & Wise, M. N. (Eds.). (2007). Science without laws: Model systems, cases, exemplary narratives. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Danto, A. (1985). Narration and knowledge, including the integral text of Analytical Philosophy of History (1964). New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dalmédico, A. D. (2004). Chaos, disorder, and mixing: A new ‘Fin-de-Siècle’. In M. N. Wise (Ed.), Growing explanations: Historical perspectives on recent science (pp. 67–94). Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

  • Descartes, R. (1965). Discourse on method, optics, geometry, and meteorology [1637], (P. J. Olscamp, Trans.). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

  • Dirichlet, G. L. (1837). Ueber die Darstellung ganz willkührlicher Funktionen durch Sinus- und Cosinusreihen. Repertorium der Physik, 1, 152–174.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dirichlet, G. L. (1889). Sur la convergence des séries trigonométriques qui servent a représenter une fonction arbitraire entre des limites données. Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 4 (1829), 157–169. Reprinted in L. Kronecker, & L. Fuchs (Eds.), G. Lejeune Dirichlets Werke, 2 vols. (vol. I: 118–132). Berlin: Reimer.

  • Forman, P. (2007). The primacy of science in modernity, of technology in postmodernity, and of ideology in the history of technology. History and Technology, 23, 1–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gravner, J., & Griffeath, D. (2009). Modeling snow-crystal growth: A three-dimensional mesoscopic approach [Electronic Version]. Physical Review E, 79, 1–18. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.79.011601.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, D. (1989). Primate visions. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heller, E. J. (1984). Bound state eigenfunctions of classically chaotic Hamiltonian systems: Scars of periodic orbits [Electronic Version]. Physical Review Letters, 53, 1515–1518. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.1515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heller, E. J., & Tomsovic, S. (1993). Postmodern quantum mechanics [Electronic Version]. Physics Today, 46(7), 38–46. doi:10.1063/1.881358.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hellmann, G., & Neuhaus, R. (1893). Schneeskrystalle: Beobachtungen und Studien. Berlin: Mueckenberger.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hempel, C. G. (1965a). The function of general laws in history [1942]. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation, and other essays in the philosophy of science (pp. 232–243). London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hempel, C. G. (1965b). Aspects of scientific explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation: And other essays in the philosophy of science (pp. 331–496). London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hempel, C. G. (2001). Explanation in science and history [1963]. In: The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in science, explanation, and rationality (pp. 276–296). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Hooke, R. (1961). Micrographia [1665]. New York: Dover Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kepler, J. (1966). The six-cornered snowflakeI [1611]. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klein, U. (2003). Experiments, models, paper tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands. Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, 6, 1–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1990). Drawing things together. In M. Lynch & S. Woolgar (Eds.), Representation in scientific practice (pp. 19–68). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1999). Circulating reference: Sampling the soil in the Amazon forest. In B. P. Latour (Ed.), Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the reality of science studies (pp. 24–79). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laughlin, R. B., & Pines, D. (2000). The theory of everything [Electronic Version]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97, 28–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laughlin, R. B., Pines, D., et al. (2000). The middle way [Electronic Version]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97, 32–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Libbrecht, K. G. (2006). Field guide to snowflakes. St. Paul: Voyageur Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Libbrecht, K. G. (2011a). Snowcrystals.com. Retrieved 3 April 2011 from http://www.its.caltech.edu/atomic/snowcrystals/photos/photos.htm; http://www.its.caltech.edu/atomic/snowcrystals/photos2/photos2.htm; http://www.its.caltech.edu/atomic/snowcrystals/photos3/photos3.htm.

  • Libbrecht, K. G. (2011b). Snowcrystals.com. Retrieved 3 April 2011 from http://www.its.caltech.edu/atomic/snowcrystals/faqs/faqs.htm.

  • Morgan, M. S. (2001). Models, stories, and the economic world. Journal of Economic Methodology, 8, 361–384.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, M. S. (2007). The curious case of the prisoner’s dilemma: Model situation? Exemplary narrative? In Creager et al. 2007, pp. 157–185.

  • Morse, P. M., & Feshbach, H. (1953). Methods of theoretical physics, vol 2. New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nakaya, U. (1954). Snow crystals: Natural and artificial. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Oreskes, N. (2007). From scaling to simulation: Changing meanings and ambitions of models in geology. In: Creager et al. 2007, pp. 93–124.

  • Poisson, S. D. (1835). Théorie analytique de la chaleur. Paris: Bachelier.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, T. M. (1999). Quantification and the accounting ideal in science. In M. Biagioli (Ed.), The science studies reader (pp. 394–406). New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a history of epistemic things: Synthesizing proteins in the test tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  • Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, Vol. 1. (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Schweber, S. S. (1993). Physics, community, and the crisis in physical theory. Physics Today, 46, 34–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, C., & Wise, M. N. (1989). Energy and empire: A biographical study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swammerdamm, J. (1682). Histoire générale des insectes. Utrecht: Guillaume de Walcheren.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tilghman, S. (2009, October 13). Schmidt fund to advance science through support for transformative technology [announcing a $25 M endowment fund from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy]. News at Princeton. Retrieved 3 April 2011 from http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S25/54/00M94/.

  • White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wise, M. N. (2004). Afterward. In M. N. Wise (Ed.), Growing explanations: Historical perspectives on recent science (pp. 327–332). Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wise, M. N., & Brock, D. (1998). The culture of quantum chaos. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 29, 369–389.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

For extensive discussions I thank Mary Morgan, Lorraine Daston, and my long-time collaborator and muse Elaine Wise, also Guido Barbujani, Krishna Veeramah, Philip Kitcher, Manfred Laubichler, and an especially probing anonymous referee. An earlier version benefited from comments of participants in the conference on Historical Epistemology at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, 24–26 July 2008.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Center for Society and Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1473, USA

    M. Norton Wise

Authors
  1. M. Norton Wise
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to M. Norton Wise.

Additional information

Delivered originally as the History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture, 20 November 2009, Phoenix, Arizona.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Wise, M.N. Science as (Historical) Narrative. Erkenn 75, 349–376 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9339-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9339-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation