Abstract
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.
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09 March 2020
In the original publication of this article, the acknowledgement section has been missed to publish. Now the same has been provided in this correction.
Notes
Mary S. Morgan is principal investigator in an ERC-funded project under the title “Narrative Science”.
I would say that this characterization of the distinction mainly involves what Dufour calls arguer-centered (or reason-giver-centered) criteria [Dufour (2017), p. 28ff], but it does so just in order to provide means to analyze what is consciously only a snapshot of a dynamic activity. What starts as an explanation for the reason-giver, may very rapidly become an argument when confronted with her interlocutor’s view of the issue.
McKeon (2013) conceptualizes this structural similarity vs. pragmatic distinctiveness in terms of acknowledging the distinction between the speech acts of arguing and explaining (having different illocutionary aims) while denying the possibility of a distinction as related to the products of those speech acts. The models and diagrams used in this paper incorporate the pragmatic distinction insofar as it helps clarifying, among other things, the interplay between both kinds of pragmatic uses of reasons. Moreover, the analytic employment of the distinction does not aim, in any case, at “denying” explanations their place and significance within Argumentation Theory.
Toulmin’s model identifies other parts of the argument, but these are the basic, constitutive ones. Notice that for something to be a justificatory reason in Toulmin’s model it doesn´t have to “imply” the conclusion, just support it. In a similar way, a warrant doesn’t need to express any logically formalizable relation (of a sufficient, necessary or equivalent character).
For reasons I state elsewhere (Olmos 2019), I don’t endorse such denomination.
This narrative quality of material experimental practices has also been accorded to more problematic and, for certain philosophers even empirically dubious, modes of scientific experimentation as modelling, simulations or “thought experiments” (Olmos 2017).
This characterization corresponds to a second pattern of narrative arguments different from arguments consisting in parallel stories (first pattern) and from arguments about narratives (third pattern) (Olmos 2015, pp. 156–157).
Although Harman’s paper is nearly always mentioned as the one that introduced the notion and started the discussion about “inference to the best explanation” as an improvement on (or a different way to approach) abduction, most of it is in fact dedicated to comparing abduction (or IBE) to induction as the best way to understand typical instances of scientific argumentation.
The backing, another less frequently explicit part of the argument in Toulmin’s model acts as justificatory evidence for the warrant itself, in a recursive pattern that might be iteratively questioned in its different levels.
A holism in which whole general theories seem to account for how things happen (in all their narrative details) in an experimental situation, according to Quine’s lemma: “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (Quine 1951, p. 42).
Some critics of the original Hempelian model of explanation also suggest the relaxation of the condition demanding a “covering law” as part of the explanans. See, for example Caponi (2014) who argues for a wider model (particularly useful for evolutionary biology) based on the kind of “conditional articulators” that express a “locally invariant relation” (emphasis added), the kind of relation with exceptions, with a possibly undefined range of validity, not universal, not necessary, etc., something very like the Toulminian warrants that we are used to appeal to in argumentation theory. According to Caponi, many instances of causal explanations are based on causal invariants that are multiple, heterogeneous and irregular, always local and always ephemeral, that make natural phenomena understandable but not necessarily generalizable.
Terrall’s case-study is, nevertheless more interesting and complicated for our purposes, because Réamur and Trembley’s sought-for theories (their scientific conclusions) have also a narrative character as they crystalize in stereotyped narratives about the characteristic development of organisms. This would rather fall under the second of our explored patterns.
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Olmos, P. Revisiting Accounts of Narrative Explanation in the Sciences: Some Clarifications from Contemporary Argumentation Theory. Argumentation 34, 449–465 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09511-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09511-5