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 canvasses 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 traverse 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 will work through convergences and divergences in how narrative has mattered for science, and where narrative might lead us from here.
