This paper attempts to revive the epistemological discussion of scientific articles. What are their epistemic aims, and how are they achieved? We argue that scientific experimental articles are best understood as a particular kind of narrative: i.e., modernist narratives (think: Woolf, Joyce), at least in the sense that they employ many of the same techniques, including colligation and the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives. We suggest that this way of writing is necessary given the nature of modern science, but it also (...) has specific epistemic benefits: it provides readers with an effective way to grasp the content of scientific articles which increases their understanding. On the other hand, modernist writing is vulnerable to certain kinds of epistemic abuses, which can be found instantiated in modern scientific writing as well. (shrink)

The psychoanalytical case history was in many ways the pivot point of John Forrester’s reflections on case-based reasoning. Yet the Freudian case is not without its own textual forebears. This article closely analyses texts from two earlier case-writing traditions in order to elucidate some of the negotiations by which the case history as a textual form came to articulate the mode of reasoning that we now call ‘thinking in cases’. It reads Eugène Azam’s 1876 observation of Félida X and her (...) ‘double personality’—the case that brought both Azam and Félida to prominence in late 19th-century French science—against a medico-surgical case penned by the Bordeaux physician in the same decade. While the stylistics of Azam’s medical case mirror its epistemic underpinnings in the ‘vertical’ logics of positivist science, the multiple narratives interwoven in Félida’s case grant both Azam and his patient the role of knowledge-making actors in the text. This narrative transformation chimes with the way Azam reasons ‘horizontally’ from particulars to Félida’s singular condition, but sits in tension with his choice to structure the observation along a ‘vertical’ axis. Between the two, we glimpse the emergence of the psychological observation as a mode of writing and thus of thinking in cases. (shrink)

Andreas Hesselius and Pehr Kalm both spent time in eastern North America during the first half of the 18th century. Both came with an ardent desire to observe and learn about the natural environment and inhabitants of the region. Both produced writings, in the form of journals that have proved immensely useful to subsequent scholars. Yet their writings also display differences that illuminate the epistemological and sociological underpinnings of their observations, and which had consequences for their encounters with foreign environments. (...) Hesselius, who served as pastor to the Swedish congregation in Philadelphia from 1712 to 1724, described his experiences and observations with what we might call a historical awareness, while Kalm, known as the first of Linnaeus’s students to travel to the New World, primarily offered dehistoricized and denarrativized taxonomic ethnographic descriptions. At first glance, Hesselius and Kalm appear to illustrate perfectly Michel Foucault’s description of the difference between Renaissance and classical epistemologies. Kalm’s disembodied and decontextualized representations fit well with Foucault’s description of natural history in the classical age as consisting ‘of undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves…and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words’. This article, however, points out that while Hesselius and Kalm arrive at similar descriptions of plants and other-than-human beings by employing different methodologies, when it comes to describing indigenous peoples their respective methodologies lead to radically different approaches, with Hesselius writing them into history, while Kalm relegates them to ethnology in the sense of savage ‘peoples without histories’. (shrink)

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long and (...) tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology. (shrink)

This essay considers insects’ place-making powers in history of science topics. Insects have co-shaped the geographies of knowledge production throughout history in three primary dimensions: through their size, density, and multiplane existence. Insects’ miniature worlds have helped humans to create trans-scale analogies. Their spatial transgression and swarming capacity have overwhelmed people, including field researchers, contributing to the making of the places where science is produced. Finally, insects’ “ontologically alien” ways of engaging with environments (e.g., flying and living underground) have offered (...) valuable material for humans’ imaginings of their own realities. By prioritizing insects’ own spatial characteristics, this tripartite typology of human/insect entanglements intends to spur new ways of writing histories of science that engage with space and place. (shrink)

The topic of the presence, legitimacy and epistemic worth of narrative explanations in different kinds of scientific discourse has already enjoyed several revivals within related discussions in contemporary philosophy of science. In fact, we have recently witnessed a more extensive, more unprejudiced and ambitious attention to narrative modes of making science. I think we need a systematic theoretical framework in order to categorize these different functions of narratives and understand their role in scientific explanatory and justificatory practice. My claim is (...) that some distinctions and analytic tools developed within the field of contemporary Argumentation Theory might be of help. (shrink)