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Narrative in Culture: the Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences

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Narrative in Culture: the Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences WARWICK STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE General editor: David Wood In both philosophical and literary studies much of the best original work today explores both the tensions and the intricate connections between what have often been treated as separate fields. In philosophy there is a widespread conviction that the notion of an unmediated search for truth represents an over- simplification of the philosopher’s task, and that the language of philosophical argument requires its own interpretation. Even in the most rigorous instances of the analytic tradition, a tradition inspired by the possibilities of formalization and by the success of the natural sciences, we find demands for ‘clarity’, for ‘tight’ argument, and distinctions between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ proofs which call out for a rhetorical reading—even for an aesthetic of argument. In literature many of the categories presupposed by traditions which give priority to ‘enactment’ over ‘description’ and oppose ‘theory’ in the name of ‘lived experience’ are themselves under challenge as requiring theoretical analysis, while it is becoming increasingly clear that to exclude literary works from philosophical probing is to trivialize many of them. Further, modern literary theory necessarily looks to philosophy to articulate its deepest problems and the effects of this are transmitted in turn to critical reading, as the widespread influence of deconstruction and of a more reflective hermeneutics has begun to show. When one recalls that Plato, who wished to keep philosophy and poetry apart, actually unified the two in his own writing, it is clear that the current upsurge of interest in this field is only re-engaging with the questions alive in the broader tradition. The University of Warwick pioneered the graduate study of the intertwinings of philosophy and literature, and its recently established Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature has won wide respect. This new Series brings the work of the Centre to a larger public in volumes which combine a sense of new direction with traditional standards of intellectual rigour. The Series will be further developed by the inclusion of monographs by distinguished academics. WARWICK STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE Edited by Andrew Benjamin Books in the series include: EXCEEDINGLY NIETZSCHE Edited by David Farrell Krell and David Wood POST-STRUCTURALIST CLASSICS Edited by Andrew Benjamin THE PROVOCATION OF LEVINAS Edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood THE PROBLEMS OF MODERNITY: Adorno and Benjamin Edited by Andrew Benjamin ABJECTION, MELANCHOLIA, AND LOVE: The work of Julia Kristeva Edited by John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin THE BIBLE AS RHETORIC Edited by Martin Warner WRITING THE FUTURE Edited by David Wood PHILOSOPHERS’ POETS Edited by David Wood JUDGING LYOTARD Edited by Andrew Benjamin ON PAUL RICOEUR: Narrative and interpretation Edited by David Wood NARRATIVE IN CULTURE The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature Edited by CRISTOPHER NASH London and New York First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1990 University of Warwick Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested. ISBN 0-203-98111-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-04156-2 (Print Edition) (hbk) ISBN 0-415-10344-4 (Print Edition) (pbk) Contents List of Contributors vii Foreword xi Acknowledgements xv NARRATIVE AND 'FACT' Social Science 1 Storytelling in Economics 5 Donald N. McCloskey 2 Narrative Theories and Legal Discourse 23 Bernard S. Jackson 3 Self-knowledge as Praxis: Narrative and Narration in 53 Psychoanalysis J.M. Bernstein Physical Science 4 Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse 83 Rom Harré 5 Making a Discovery: Narratives of Split Genes 103 Greg Myers NARRATIVE AND 'FICTION' Philosophy and Literature 6 Narrative and Invention: The Limits of Fictionality 133 Peter Lamarque 7 Ill Locutions 157 Christine Brooke-Rose vi 8 How Primordial is Narrative? 177 Michael Bell 9 Slaughtering the Subject: Literature’s Assault on 203 Narrative Cristopher Nash Index 223 List of Contributors DONALD N.McCLOSKEY, Professor of Economics and of History at the University of Iowa and Director of the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Honorary Research Fellow of Birkbeck College (London), and the recipient of numerous grants from major research bodies around the world including the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among his books are Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline; Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain; The Applied Theory of Price; The Rhetoric of Economics; The Writing of Economics; and Econometric History. He is working on Risky Ground: The Open Fields of England and The Storied Character of Economics. BERNARD S. JACKSON, until recently Professor of Law at the University of Kent at Canterbury, is now Queen Victoria Professor of Law in the University of Liverpool. Having first specialized in ancient law (Theft in Early fewish Law and Essays in fewish and Comparative Legal History), he has more recently become interested in the development of a semiotic theory of law (Semiotics and Legal Theory; Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence). He is Secretary-General and Treasurer of the International Association for the Semiotics of Law/Association Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/Revue Internationale de Sémiotique furidique. In preparation is his book Wisdom-Laws, based on his Speaker’s Lectures in Biblical Studies delivered in the University of Oxford. viii J.M.BERNSTEIN is Senior Lecturer and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex. His PhD work at the University of Edinburgh was on Kant’s philosophy of science. An increasingly vital figure in contemporary debate focusing on that crucial area where political theory comes to interrogate afresh traditional philosophical and psychological modes of thought affecting, for example, aesthetics and metaphysics, he is the author of The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form and Art, Metaphysics and Modernity: The Fate of Aesthetics from Kant to Derrida, forthcoming. He is the editor of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, and is presently at work on a study provisionally entitled Political Love and Tragic Culture. ROM HARRÉ obtained a BSc in Engineering and Mathematics and an MA in Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. A seminal scholar in the modern analysis of the rhetoric of science, he began as a physics and mathematics teacher at Kings College, Auckland, was Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of the Punjab, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at the University of Leicester, and has been University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science, Oxford, since 1960, and a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, since 1963. Among his books are An Introduction to the Logic of the Sciences; Matter and Method; The Anticipation of Nature; The Principles of Scientific Thinking; The Philosophies of Science; and Great Experiments. GREG MYERS, Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Bradford where he teaches linguistics and translation, has taught rhetoric at the University of Texas and literature at the University of Lancaster. His book, Writing Biology: The Social Construction of Scientific Texts, is soon to be published, and other recent publications include ‘The pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles’ (Applied Linguistics) and ‘Every picture tells a story: illustrations in E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology’ (Human Studies). One of the most forcefully acute in the new generation of analysts of the strategies of professional and public discourse, he is currently working on a sociological study of the relations between linguistics and artificial intelligence research in Britain. PETER LAMARQUE, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, has written on metaphor and extensively on fiction ix in, for example, his ‘Truth and art in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince’ (Philosophy and Literature); ‘How can we fear and pity fictions?’; ‘Bits and pieces of fiction’ (British Journal of Aesthetics); and ‘Fiction and reality’ (in a volume edited by him, Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics), while in Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science he has published ‘On the irrelevance of psychoanalysis to literary criticism’. He is currently at work with Stein Haugom Olsen on a book on ‘Literature, fiction and truth’, and among his considerations of Noh theatre an essay entitled ‘Expression
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