Narratives on the Large Scale: Historical Narrative Explanations in Popular Science Writing

Abstract:In the recent past, narratives have been hailed as a promising instrument for improving the effectiveness of science communication to nonscientist audiences. Narratives play an important part in how individuals comprehend the world, and persuasive narratives may often be more successful in communicating complex scientific issues to the general public than evidence-based arguments. At the same time, however, narratives have the potential to perpetuate misinformation and inaccuracies about science due to their formal characteristics. Also, as narratives are not subject to the same truth requirements as scientific argumentation, they cannot be easily countered, which can lead to serious misconceptions about important scientific topics. In this article, the role of narratives and narrative explanations in science communication is discussed regarding the genre of popular science. The essay approaches the affordances and limits of narrative in this context with two primary examples representing recent popular-science best-sellers: Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).In theoretical literature concerning narratives in science communication and popular science, the concept of narrative tends to be applied rather loosely, encompassing everything from journalistic accounts of scientific research to sequential explanations of change in natural systems. As many of the discourse types of popular science involve representations of temporal change in the non-human natural world, they necessarily also create “narratives” that do not easily fill all the characteristics of prototypical narrative representations. This article takes a closer look at the narrative qualities of science popularization, focusing especially on popular scientific “histories” featuring human species as their main protagonist. The aim is to explore this topic further by a more comprehensive categorization of different kinds of narratives and narrative explanations in the selected popular scientific texts. With this theoretical emphasis, the article will contribute to a fuller understanding of the affordances and limitations of narrative in addressing scientific issues.