Abstract
Why do science journalists cast their material in narrative form, using familiar fictional genres such as the detective story? Why do they avoid other genres, such as the dialogue? Popular science provides a cognitive space, and the scientific detective story an interpretative repertoire, in which only one theory of science is readily but tacitly expressed 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 stories imply, and it can progress only through a cooperative effort among scientists to conquer nature by labour, not their adversaries in debate. To develop a new critical self-consciousness about theories of science, popular science needs to explore alternative literary forms, particularly the radically anti-Baconian, Socratic dialogue.
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