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Given how narrative is commonly discussed, used, and abused, some readers might be puzzled by what follows. For anyone who finds themselves in that position, the key things to know are that narrative is not inherently soggy, or something to be suspicious of, or peculiarly literary, or only about framing one's interpretation. Narrative is much more nimble. It features in, and helps to structure, our thoughts, representations, and arguments, all in ways we do not typically notice or appreciate. We demonstrate this ubiquity through attention to relations between narrative and evidence.
By definition, evidence arrives to us as already purposed for one argument, or a set of arguments, rather than some other, or a set of other, alternatives. So, first: How does it arrive to us like this? Second, there are different kinds of evidence, including anecdotal, visual, statistical, experimental, and beyond. Users often arrange these kinds in a hierarchy, though the order of the hierarchy will change from field to field, industry to industry, context to context. Third, moving between evidence and argument requires inference making. Narrative plays an important role in all three of these activities. Not always, and not all at the time, but very often, and certainly often enough to be worth giving closer attention to.
Narrative turns facts and data into evidence
Obviously there are no clean, unbiased, facts. Facts and data all come from somewhere, and will bear the stamp of their origins; indeed, the status of facts, and so their reliability as evidence, depends on the integrity of how those facts are gathered and assembled (see Morgan, 2011). Nevertheless, a change in label is required when those points of ‘information’ (or data) are taken to be ‘evidence’ for some claim, argument or hypothesis. Narrative often provides the channel for this transformation.
Sometimes this works through the adoption of a particular key concept, one which is then readily accessed through a shorthand term. For instance, once we learn what ‘moral economies’ are in history, or what ‘behavioural sinks’ are in ethology, or what ‘continental drift’ is in geology, they tell us what kind of data we need to explore these concepts. But it is often the narratives using those concepts that become the means for turning data into evidence. Take behavioural sinks, which we assume most readers will be unfamiliar with, not least because, in contrast with moral economies and continental drift, behavioural scientists now consider the concept defunct. According to Ramsden (2011), John B. Calhoun proposed this term in the mid twentieth century, to cover phenomena which he believed to have established by experiments on rodent populations. In short - so his narrative went - when a population of rats reached a point of over-crowding, they would begin to exhibit behavioural abnormalities which could range from increased aggression, to increased sexual activity, the biting of tails, and so on. For a time this was a very persuasive narrative, those aware of the ‘behavioural sink’ phenomenon had a ready-to-hand way in which to make some series of facts spring to life as evidence for an argument concerning the dangerous outcomes of over-crowding and excessive population growth. The argument and narrative was extended to human populations, and led to changes in the design of prison wings and student dorms. This kind of conceptual niftiness was made possible thanks to the narrative that turned the data into evidence for a particular set of phenomena.
Narrative and evidential alternatives
Historians of science have analysed how different scientific communities at different times have preferred one kind of data over another as evidence, and so produced different accounts of the same phenomenon. They have also noted the difficulties of bringing different kinds of data to speak together. In the former case, different experts may produce alternative narrative accounts of the same phenomena; in the latter, narrative is one strategy which helps to integrate multiple kinds of evidence.
For a prime example of the latter, consider one of the cases included in the Narrative Science project’s first anthology, taken from the history of economics. David Ricardo is often recognised as introducing ‘scientistic’ argumentation into classical economics. His classic: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817, 1st edition -1821, 3rd edition), proceeded primarily through textual arguments and evidence from observations. However, he also wished to introduce more abstract mathematics, and in order to make this kind of argumentation, and the evidence it implicated, more transparent and persuasive, he expressed his arguments in a series of mini-narratives. The point here is that the status and persuasiveness of some forms of evidence have often benefited from articulation through, or at least with, narratives. This is important to remember at a time when ‘stories’, or the much maligned ‘anecdotal evidence’, might just be dismissed out of hand – when indeed both may play a crucial role in the evidence-argument chain.
Narrative inferences
By now it should be clear that evidence does far more than merely verify or falsify hypotheses, and contributes to many parts of scientific life. Narrative appears not just alongside observation and theory development, but also provides experts in all fields the means to reason with and about evidence: to take it apart and put it back together, and to weigh and assess for inconsistencies when adopting different perspectives.
An easily appreciated example can be found in one of our working papers, on ‘Narrative Positioning’. This paper describes and analyses an example of work at the interface of biology and engineering, in which a group of scientists and engineers dedicated themselves to the question ‘why do dandelion seeds fly?’ Answering this question required that they amass a whole array of different kinds of evidence, including modelling in fluid engineering, results of botanical investigations, light microscopy, and X-ray computed micro-tomography. These diverse evidences acted as the background against which new and ever narrower questions could be asked. The research programme proceeded along a number of plots at once, looking for opportunities where they might intersect, or anticipate a dead end, and so on. The overall narrative of the project could change quickly and easily, depending on evidential results as they came in.
Knowing that we can think about the development of a project as occurring in ways that are similar to the development of a novel, highlights further ways in which narratives may structure the way we use and think with evidence in both our scientific and our daily lives.
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