'Narrative Science eloquently parries dismissive, 'just-so' critiques of story-telling in science by demonstrating that scientists past and present have used narrative as a way of thinking: that is, a tool for making sense of the natural, human, and social worlds they study, and for creating new knowledge.' Anne Vila, University of Wisconsin-Madison
List of figures; Authors and affiliations; Foreword Mary S. Morgan, Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry; Prologues; 1. Narrative: A general purpose technology for science Mary S. Morgan; 2. What is narrative in narrative science? The narrative science approach Kim M. Hajek; Part I. Matters of Time: When time matters in the sciences, it matters in their narratives, but those narratives rarely use a simple account of time; 3. Mass extinctions and narratives of recurrence John E. Huss; 4. The narrative nature of geology and the rewriting of the stac fada story Andrew Hopkins; 5. Reasoning from narratives and models: reconstructing the tohoku earthquake Teru Miyake; 6. Stored and storied time in archaeology Anne Teather; Part II. Accessing Nature's Narratives: When nature is seen as narrating itself, narrative becomes a constituent feature of scientific accounts; 7. Great exaptations: On reading Darwin's plant narratives Devin Griffiths; 8. From memories to forecasting: Narrating imperial storm science Debjani Bhattacharyya; 9. Visual evidence and narrative in botany and war: Two domains, one practice Elizabeth Haines; 10. The trees' tale: Filigreed phylogenetic trees and integrated narratives Nina Kranke; 11. Process tracing and narrative science Sharon Crasnow; Part III. Research Narratives: When scientists write about their research, their narratives centre on their practices but reveal their beliefs about phenomena; 12. Research articles as narratives: Familiarizing communities with an approach Robert Meunier; 13. Thick and thin chemical narratives Mat Paskins; 14. Reporting on plagues: Epidemiological reasoning in the early twentieth century Lukas Engelmann; 15. The politics of representation: Narratives of automation in twentieth century American mathematics Stephanie Dick; 16. Chronicle, genealogy, and narrative: Understanding synthetic biology in the image of historiography Berry; Part IV. Narrative Sensibility and Argument: When narrative acts as a site for reasoning; 17. Anecdotes: epistemic switching in medical narratives Brian Hurwitz; 18. Narrative performance and the 'taboo on causal inference': A case study of conceptual remodelling and implicit causation Elspeth Jajdelska; 19. Reading mathematical proofs as narratives Line Edlsev Andersen; 20. Narrative solutions to a common evolutionary problem John Beatty; 21. Just-so what? Paula Olmos; 22. Narrative and natural language M. Norton Wise; Index.