Events

Connecting the Stars: Narrative Knowledge and Productive Research in Astronomy

Narratives are common reasoning forms in everyday life and the study of history. Philosophers of science have also recently characterized narratives as a “technology of sense-making,” a cognitive tool that connects diverse scientific elements to form coherent knowledge, functioning extensively in the historical sciences. Narratives have special features: they can be loose in organization, forge connections despite gaps, incorporate contingent changes, and stitch phenomena from different domains. However, skeptics insist that narratives produce misleading “just-so” stories, unless supplemented with independent verification. This creates a dilemma: unwarranted narratives do not benefit science; when they do, it is because of their verification rather than their distinctively narrative features. This project accounts for the epistemic and methodological benefits of the narrative form using two cases of modern astronomy. In the first case, narratives were key to establishing time measurement in the universe. Narratives enabled triangulation of different measurement methods, facilitating convergent results from drastic discrepancies. Constructing narratives about the history of the universe helped to compare time indicators that did not strictly measure the same quantity, and alternative narratives built upon different measurement results served as the unit for measurement evaluation. In the second case, narrative-making built a toolkit for modeling novel phenomena. In astronomers’ first account of the exoplanet Hot Jupiter, constructing a plausible narrative of orbital migration brought together multiple models that were designed for other purposes, adjusted them to this specific phenomenon, developed supplementary mechanisms, and explored the models’ outcome space. These cases reject narrative skeptics’ assumption that the only type of knowledge that the best narrative could provide is a true story. Instead, unwarranted narratives can provide a special kind of knowledge, the know-how about using tools like measurements and models. With this, narratives also constitute part of the story of how astronomy succeeds as a historical science.

Zoom

Monday, March 2, 2026 9:30 AM

Inperson
BHI Conference Room and Zoom