Trivial pursuit: the case of the travelling facts

Abstract

What happens when facts, real or hypothesised, are used in a context different to the one where they were discovered or produced? What facilitates and what hinders their inter-contextual journeys? Do they undergo any changes in the course of their travels? How fruitful are they when they arrive at a new destination? Under what conditions can we say that facts have travelled well? The sixteen essays in this volume, co-edited by Howlett and Morgan, attempt to address these prima facie alluring questions and others like them. The volume’s contributors hail mostly from the social, and in particular the historical, studies of science. Each contribution opens a window into the (occasionally bidirectional) travels of facts between contexts. The contexts are variably manifested. Sometimes they are distinct scientific disciplines as, for example, in Ramsden’s essay where facts about the crowding of rats found their way from ecology to social and behavioural science. At times they involve the same discipline but are spatiotemporally separated. Valeriani’s essay, for example, details the travels of architectural and construction facts from Italy to England in the Renaissance. Finally, they sometimes concern the scientific and the public domains. Oreskes’ essay, for example, tells the story of how facts from the climate sciences vied with ‘facts’ from the Western Fuels Association’s campaign against anthropogenic global warming for the public’s attention. The sheer diversity of the case studies, which also includes fiction and science popularisation (Adams), medical practice and science (Ankeny), ethology and behavioural science (Burkhardt), longevity (Haycock), agriculture and technology transfer (Howlett and Velkar), biology (Leonelli), epidemiology (Mansnerus), nanotechnology (Merz), romance novels and evolutionary psychology (Schell), architecture (Schneider), hydraulics, civil engineering and flood risk management (Whatmore and Landstrom) and archaeology (Wylie), generates the expectation that