Narrative ordering and explanation

This paper investigates the important role of narrative in social science case-based research. The focus is on the use of narrative in creating a productive ordering of the materials within such cases, and on how such ordering functions in relation to ‘narrative explanation’. It argues that narrative ordering based on juxtaposition - using an analogy to certain genres of visual representation - is associated with creating and resolving puzzles in the research field. Analysis of several examples shows how the use of conceptual or theoretical resources within the narrative ordering of ingredients enables the narrative explanation of the case to be resituated at other sites, demonstrating how such explanations can attain scope without implying full generality

Glass ceilings and sticky floors: drawing new ontologies

How did the ‘glass ceiling’ and related characteristics of female labour force experience become recognised as a proper object for social scientific study? Exploring interactions between the contexts of discovery and justification reveals how this phenomenon was recognised and established by combining different forms of expertise and experience that came from both within and without the social scientific fields. The resulting object of study might well be described as embedding a ‘civil or community ontology’, for the intersections of facts and values in these different knowledge communities was equally important in defining the content of that object of research

Glass ceilings and sticky floors: drawing new ontologies

How did the ‘glass ceiling’ and related characteristics of female labour force experience become recognised as a proper object for social scientific study? Exploring interactions between the contexts of discovery and justification reveals how this phenomenon was recognised and established by combining different forms of expertise and experience that came from both within and without the social scientific fields. The resulting object of study might well be described as embedding a ‘civil or community ontology’, for the intersections of facts and values in these different knowledge communities was equally important in defining the content of that object of research

Exemplification and the use-values of cases and case studies

This paper provides an account of the 'use-value' of case-based research by showing how social scientists exploit cases, and case studies, in a variety of practices of inference and extension. The critical basis for making such extensions relies on the power of a case, or the account given of a case (the case-study account), to exemplify certain features of the social world in ways which prove valuable for further analysis: either of the same case, or in many domains beyond the original case study. Framing use-values in terms of exemplification compares favourably with understanding reasoning beyond the case either as a form of analogical reasoning or in taking cases as experimentable objects

Inducing visibility and visual deduction

Scientists use diagrams not just to visualize objects and relations in their fields, both empirical and theoretical, but to reason with them as tools of their science. While the two dimensional space of diagrams might seem restrictive, scientific diagrams can depict many more than two elements, can be used to visualise the same materials in myriad different ways, and can be constructed in a considerable variety of forms. This paper takes up two generic puzzles about 2D visualizations. First: How do scientists in different communities use 2D spaces to depict materials which are not fundamentally spatial? This prompts the distinction between diagrams that operate in different kinds of spaces: ‘real’, ‘ideal’, and ‘artificial’. And second: How do diagrams, in these different usages of 2D space, support various kinds of visual reasoning that cross over between inductive and deductive? The argument links the representational form and content of a diagram (its vocabulary and grammar) with the kinds of inferential and manipulative reasoning that are afforded, and constrained, by scientists’ different usages of 2D space

Model Narratives

The models of scientists &#8211; to be found in their diagrams, equations, maps, and even machines &#8211; can be understood as their representations of phenomena in the world. But when we look back into how scientists created those models, we often find processes of narrative-making: scientists, in seeking to understand their part of the world, create narratives about how it might work. And then, in usage, we find those model-representations becoming tools: tools of exploration, explanation and reasoning, activities that often involve scientists telling narratives with their models. So narrative resources come into two processes of scientists’ modelling: first in spinning narratives to help fashion their models of the world, and second in using narrative accounts to reason with and explore their ‘world in the model’. Models and narratives seem odd bed-fellows, but are often conjoined in the creative work of science. Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; an elected Fellow of the British Academy; and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published on social scientists’ practices of modelling, observing, measuring and making case studies; and is especially interested in how ideas, numbers and facts are used in projects designed to change the world. Her most recent books are How Well Do Facts Travel? (2011) and The World in the Model (2012); and the outcome of a major ERC grant: Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800 (edited with Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry, 2022).Mary S. Morgan, Model Narratives, lecture, ICI Berlin, 30 May 2023, video recording, mp4, 53:25 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230530

Insider apology for microeconomic theorising?

This comment on 'Economic theories and their Dueling interpretations' questions the descriptive adequacy of the ‘sociology of economics' proposed by Gilboa, Postlewaite, Samuelson, and Schmeidler (GPSS) (2022). We ask whether economists still perceive the role of microeconomic theory as central as do GPSS. In particular, is present-day economics unified by the principles of maximising, subject to constraints and equilibrium analysis? We argue that this is not the case. GPSS’ appeal to the interpretative flexibility of economic theories appears apologetic, especially the suggestion that theories and models, which once were considered positive descriptions or predictive instruments, are now cast as analytical or methodological exercises. We conclude on a more constructive note, drawing from the recent philosophical discussion of modelling which, quite paradoxically, grants highly idealized and simplified models a more important role than GPSS appear to allow

‘If p? Then What?’ Thinking Within, With, and From Cases

The provocative paper by John Forrester: ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ (1996) opened up the question of case thinking as a separate mode of reasoning in the sciences. Case-based reasoning is certainly endemic across a number of sciences, but it has looked different according to where it has been found. This paper investigates this mode of science - namely thinking in cases - by questioning the different interpretations of ‘If p?’ and exploring the different interpretative responses of what follows in ‘Then What?’. The aim is to characterise how ‘reasoning in, within, with, and from cases’ forms a mode of scientific investigation for single cases, for runs of cases, and for comparative cases, drawing on materials from a range of different fields in which case-based reasoning appears