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BYU Studies: Science as Storytelling, and the Atomization of Knowledge
While looking for something to read during my Christmas vacation, I discovered that the last 2014 issue of BYU Studies contains an article by Barry Bickmore and David Grandy titled, "Science as Storytelling." The article is nicely summarized as follows:
Much [o]f our modern world revolves around something called "science." But what is science? Interestingly, this turns out to be a very difficult question to answer because every definition seems to include something we don't consider science or seems to exclude something we do consider science. In this essay, the authors present their own definition: Science is the modern art of creating stories that explain observations of the natural world and that could be useful for predicting, and possibly even controlling, nature. They then refine this definition by offering seven rules that scientific storytelling must follow to distinguish it from other genres. These rules fall under the following general topics: reproducibility, predictive power, prospects for improvement, naturalism, uniformitarianism, simplicity, and harmony.Bickmore and Grandy explain that their article originated as part of an introductory science course in order to address simplistic views of science and the corresponding tendency to reject scientific findings that clash with personal, religious, or political views. Theirs is a time-honored attempt to define what makes science unique from other human endeavors.
Their use of storytelling as the central concept of science made me nervous at first because it is easy to dismiss scientists as making up stories. They address this concern and explain their reason of word choice.
[W]e chose the word “stories” to emphasize the idea that the explanations scientists come up with are not themselves facts. Scientific explanations are always subject to change, since any new observations we make might contradict previously established explanations. The universe is a very complicated place, and it is likely that any explanation that humans come up with will be, at best, an approximation of the truth.I think use the word "story" is fine as long as it is used loosely. For example, if you were to ask how water gets to the faucets in my house, I would tell you a story beginning with the entrance of the main water pipe into my basement, and how the water is distributed to various places by various pipes. Plumbers count on building codes to help ensure that the story is consistent from house to house. However, occasionally they will find deviations or expansions on the basic story. As they attempt to understand these variations, they are basically refining the story of that building's flow of water and acting accordingly in order to control the flow. When pipes are hidden by walls, floors, or ceilings, there will always be a little uncertainty in the story. But with enough probing of the system, the remaining uncertainties become negligible or practically irrelevant.
Unfortunately, the attempt to separate facts from stories (or hypotheses, theories, etc) can also be a source of mischief. It can lead to what I call the atomization of knowledge, where knowledge is broken down into the smallest possible pieces and loses its force because the formation of context and relationships between facts is prevented. Take, for example, the following quote of Hugh Nibley provided by R. Gary in the comments to my last post.
The fossil or potsherd or photograph that I hold in my hand may be called a fact—it is direct evidence, an immediate experience; but my interpretation of it is not a fact, it is entirely a picture of my own construction. I cannot experience ten thousand or forty million years—I can only imagine, and the fact that my picture is based on facts does not make it a fact, even when I think the evidence is so clear and unequivocal as to allow no other interpretation. (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 1, ch. 2, 25-27.)That's all well and good, but a dedicated skeptic might question whether a fossil is actually a fact, and assert that only pixels are fact--pictures are interpretation. Actually, Bickmore and Grandy hint as much when they write:
Consider fossils. They look like the remains of living things. Is it not reasonable to suppose that they were once living things that were covered and preserved in sediment, just as dead organisms can be covered and preserved in sediment nowadays?That's quite an underselling of fossils; the evidence is better than that. I'm not criticizing the authors--they were just making a point about the consistency of cause and effect--but it helps to illustrate the problem. It took me about 10 seconds to Google up some creationists arguing that when it comes to fossils, the only facts are their physical properties (dimensions, weight, etc). Scientific troublemakers excel at this kind of game--keeping attention on the most basic indisputable facts so that higher-ordered interpretations appear to be mere guesses.
This all goes to my view that, just as it is impossible to entirely separate science from non-science, it is impossible to entirely separate fact from interpretation, and the judgment of fact vs interpretation will differ based on knowledge-base. That carbon has 6 protons is a statement of fact to chemists because it is so well tested. A non-chemist might consider it merely an interpretation. Maybe I could formalize this as a rule of thumb: if someone seems keen to separate fact from interpretation, there is a good chance that they are selling scientific garbage. This is because specialists will tend to have an appreciation of where accepted facts end and interpretations begin in their field, so they don't need to bang on about it. Further, they will tend to dispute interpretations with additional observations or facts, rather than by getting pedantic about the demarcation between the two.
From the discussion thus far you would be forgiven for wondering how scientists make any progress at all. The rules outlined by Bickmore and Grandy are key here. I list them as they appear in the article.
Rule 1: Scientific stories are crafted to explain observations, but the observations that are used as a basis for these stories must be reproducible.Although they are all important, I think rules 1, 2, 3, and 7 are particularly important. I would argue that the remaining rules are simply extensions of those four rules working together.
Rule 2: Scientists prefer stories that can predict things that were not included in the observations used to create those explanations in the first place.
Rule 3: Scientific stories should be subject to an infinitely repeating process of evaluation meant to generate more and more useful stories.
Rule 4: Scientific explanations do not appeal to the supernatural. Only naturalistic explanations are allowed.
Rule 5: Any scientific explanation involving events in the past must square with the principle of “uniformitarianism”—the assumption that past events can be explained in terms of the “natural laws” that apply today.
Rule 6: Scientists assume that nature is simple enough for human minds to understand.
Rule 7: Scientific explanations should not contradict other established scientific explanations, unless absolutely necessary.
Well, I've gone on long enough and I don't have a good way to wrap up. So I'll just say go read the article and see what you think.
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