Playing with Data

Michael Smolinsky brings the argument about “enhancing” reality, what he calls the art of “narration,” to our reception and subsequent understanding of science and its discoveries. In “Playing with Data: The Role of Fictive Narratives in Science” he contends that “for the sciences, narrative is an essential framework for providing a notion of causality, organizing complex details, describing methodology, and forming hypotheses, which are essentially fictive narratives created by synthesis, interpretation, and speculation that outstrips empirical evidence. Existing cultural narratives, too, are inescapable frameworks, because they provide the concepts by which meaning at a particular time and place is constructed.” To our current science deniers or, conversely, those who insist that science is circumscribed by facts stripped of narrative, he offers a meaningful distinction “between fiction and fictitious accounts,” for in collaboration with the data produced by science, “cultural narratives … help shape one’s understanding of the world.”