Saturday 28 August 2010

Just-So Stories

Fragmentation and Fictional Narratives

Is it any wonder that modern science has turned to power-politics and the sanction of the State in an endeavour to establish its credibility?
We live in a society inundated by self-confessed story-tellers. Whereas 100, or even 50 years ago those who told the grand narratives about the world—scientists, historians and theologians—were anxious to impress us with the accuracy and authority of their knowledge, today they seem to be clamouring to be recognized as something nearer to that of village elders, the story-tellers of the tribe.

Physics, declared Niels Bohr, father of the “Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum theory in the 1920's and 1930's tells us not about what is but what we can say to each other concerning the world. There is no “scientific method” writes Jean-Francois Lyotard, a scientist (sic) is before anything else a person “who tells stories”. This description of the scientists is echoed by John Gribbin, the physics writer, who recently commented at the end of a lengthy discussion of quantum theory, “I do not claim that it is anything more than just a fiction; all scientific models are simply Kiplingesque 'just so' stories that give us a feeling that we understand what is going on.”

Startling as this might seem to the non-scientist, within their profession such views from Bohr or Gribbin are no longer controversial. Gribbin seems in fact, consciously or unconsciously, to be echoing the American biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who had used precisely the same phrase, “just-so stories”--but without mentioning Kipling—in an essay in 1991. Science, Gould claimed, was best thought of as a series of interpretative or “adaptive stories” to explain certain phenomena.

Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2.

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