NARRATIVE FORM AND NORMATIVE FORCE - BACONIAN STORYTELLING IN POPULARSCIENCE

Why do science journalists cast their material in narrative form, usin g familiar fictional genres such as the detective story Why do they av oid other genres, such as the dialogue? Popular science provides a cog nitive space, and the scientific detective story an interpretative rep ertoire, in which only one theory of science is readily but tacitly ex pressed and endorsed, not only to a popular audience but also as part of a continuing debate among scientists themselves. There is a strong formal, structural analogy between popular scientific story-forms and the method of induction by elimination. Science is Baconian, these sto ries imply, and it can progress only through a cooperative effort amon g scientists to conquer nature by labour, not their adversaries in deb ate. To develop a new critical self-consciousness about theories of sc ience, popular science needs to explore alternative literary forms, pa rticularly the radically anti-Baconian, Socratic dialogue.