The Limits and Possibilities of Narrative Explanations
March 17–April 18, 2016
Does history require narrative? Battles have been raging over this
question since the nineteenth century, but the battle lines have been
continually redrawn. Once the challengers were base-superstructure
Marxist explanations, or Annales-style historical demography, or even
Hempelian hypothetico-deductive models from the philosophy of science.
Because these contenders have retreated from the field as far as most
historians are concerned, the latter might mistakenly assume that the
question has been settled once and for all. Such complacency overlooks
new analytic perspectives drawn from theoretical economics and adjacent
disciplines, such as game theory. Our workshop proposes to investigate
how narrative might be enriched, transformed, and/or replaced by these
new attempts to explain the past. And here comes a most intriguing
point: could it be that these novel efforts work because they already
involve a narrative element? The question at the very least can be
thought of as twofold: not only "Does history require narrative?", but
also "Do not the more analytic social sciences also require narrative?"
Convener
Contact
Participants
Bertrand
Crettez
Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II
Christoph
Conrad
Université de Genève
Lorraine J.
Daston
Permanent Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin
Claude
Diebolt
Université de Strasbourg
Paul
Erickson
Wesleyan University, Connecticut
Mary
Morgan
London School of Economics and Political Science
Franco
Moretti
Former Permanent Fellow
Stanford University
Christina
Pawlowitsch
Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II
Daniel
Schönpflug
Freie Universität Berlin Wissenschaftlicher Koordinator des Wissenschaftskollegs
Peter
Schöttler
Freie Universität Berlin