How Well Do Facts Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge

by Edited by Peter Howlett , Mary S. Morgan

• ISBN13: 9780521159586
• ISBN10: 052115958X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Why write about facts? Facts are everywhere. They litter the utterances of public life as much as the private conversations of individuals. They frequent the humanities and the sciences in equal measure. But their very ubiquity tells us not only why it is difficult to form general but sensible answers in response to seemingly simple questions about facts, but also why it is important to do so. This book discusses how facts travel, and when and why they sometimes travel well enough to acquire a life of their own. Whether or not facts travel in this manner depends not only on their character and ability to play useful roles elsewhere, but also on the labels, packaging, vehicles, and company that take them across difficult terrains and over disciplinary boundaries. These diverse stories of traveling facts, ranging from architecture to nanotechnology and from romance fiction to climate science, change the way we see the nature of facts. Facts are far from the bland and rather boring but useful objects that scientists and humanists produce and fit together to make narratives, arguments, and evidence. Rather, their extraordinary abilities to travel well - and to fly flags of many different colors in the process - shows when, how, and why facts can be used to build further knowledge beyond and away from their sites of original production and intended use.

Author Biography

Mary S. Morgan is Professor of history and philosophy of economics at the London School of Economics and the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on topics ranging from statistics to experiments to narrative, and from social Darwinism in late-nineteenth-century America to game theory in the Cold War. Her major works include The History of Econometric Ideas (1990), The Foundations of Econometric Analysis (1995, co-edited with David F. Hendry), and Models as Mediators (1999, co-edited with Margaret Morrison). Professor Morgan's account of scientific modelling is forthcoming in The World in the Model. She is currently engaged in the research project "Re-Thinking Case Studies across the Social Sciences" as a British Academy-Wolfson research professor.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
List of Contributors	p. ix
Editors' Preface	p. xv
Introduction
Travelling Facts	p. 3
Matters of Fact
Facts and Building Artefacts: What Travels in Material Objects?	p. 43
A Journey through Times and Cultures? Ancient Greek Forms in American Nineteenth-Century Architecture	p. 72
Manning's N - Putting Roughness to Work	p. 111
My Facts Are Better Than Your Facts: Spreading Good News about Global Warming	p. 136
Real Problems with Fictional Cases	p. 167
Integrity and Fruitfulness
Ethology's Traveling Facts	p. 195
Travelling Facts about Crowded Rats: Rodent Experimentation and the Human Sciences	p. 223
Using Cases to Establish Novel Diagnoses: Creating Generic Facts by Making Particular Facts Travel Together	p. 252
Technology Transfer and Travelling Facts: A Perspective from Indian Agriculture	p. 273
Archaeological Facts in Transit: The "Eminent Mounds" of Central North America	p. 301
Companionship and Character
Packaging Small Facts for Re-Use: Databases in Model Organism Biology	p. 325
Designed for Travel: Communicating Facts through Images	p. 349
Using Models to Keep Us Healthy: The Productive Journeys of Facts across Public Health Research Networks	p. 376
The Facts of Life and Death: A Case of Exceptional Longevity	p. 403
The Love Life of a Fact	p. 429
Index	p. 455
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