There are a great many features of scientific life and practice that contain core narratives, or draw on some underlying narrative, or rely on narrative in order to present and develop understanding. Many such examples will be familiar, such as accounts of evolutionary descent, explanations of how geological formations come to be as we find them, or a doctor’s case history of their patient. In each of these sites, narrative is an indispensable part of thinking through the problem, assessing the most likely explanations, and producing knowledge.
We have moved beyond the state of the art in a number of ways. First, we have uncovered narrative operating in scientific spaces and places that have not previously been investigated on these terms. Mathematical equations and proofs, for example, seem the most unlikely partners to narrative, yet we find evidence of narrative at work in them, and our analysis reveals their narrative structure. Likewise cellular development in microbiology, reverse syntheses of organic chemicals, or processes of drug discovery, are kinds of phenomena that have rarely been understood on narrative terms yet out analyses shows how important narrative understanding is to their scientific construction and usage. Second, we have expanding the range of objects and texts in which narrative can be found, well beyond the range usually attended to by literary theorists. Laboratory protocols, recipes, schema, maps, charts: narrative can be found at work in them all, demonstrating a far wider significance for results coming out of literary theory than had previously been appreciated. Third, using research in the humanities, in particular literary theory, in conjunction with some extant ideas in philosophy of science we have been able to develop a comprehensive account of the important roles that narrative plays drawing on our wide range of case-examples. This account offers alternative insights to those coming from narrative theory applied to non-fictional cases. Rather it draws on the philosophy of science to open up the particular spaces in which narrative matters to our understanding of, how scientific knowledge is produced.
Summarising the project’s aims and outcomes: we aimed to explore and map the terrain of how narrative is used in the modern sciences (c1800-present) and, by using resources from history and philosophy of science and literary theory, we showed how narrative provides a technology of sense-making for scientists which offers a reasoning tool for inference, argument and even explanation. Our research work has been made available in academic circles and in a public facing website.