Robert Meunier

Robert Meunier studies the history and epistemology of the life sciences. His research is concerned with the relationship between practice and knowledge, with a current focus on narrative practices in science and in autobiographical writing. Until recently, he worked at the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies (IMGWF) at the University of Lübeck on a project concerned with the epistemology of data-intensive biomedical research, in the context of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation’. He was also a visiting postdoctoral fellow in the Max Planck Research Group (MPRG) ‘Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences’ at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). Robert graduated in 2012 from the PhD programme ‘Foundations of the Life Sciences and their Ethical Consequences’, jointly hosted by the University of Milan and the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM), Italy. Since then, he has held fellowships and positions at the MPIWG, the ICI Berlin, the Department of History (History of Science) at LMU Munich, the Department of Philosophy (Theoretical Philosophy) at the University of Kassel, and in the ‘Narrative Science Project’ at the London School of Economics, UK. He was also the Principal Investigator in the DFG-funded research project ‘Forms of Practice, Forms of Knowledge’ (2018–21) at the University of Kassel.

Among Robert’s recent publications are: ‘Omics and AI in Precision Medicine: Maintaining Socio-Technical Imaginaries by Transforming Technological Assemblages’ (TATuP – Journal for Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice, 2023); ‘Approaches in Post-Experimental Science: The Case of Precision Medicine’ (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2022); ‘Research Narratives and Narratives of Nature in Scientific Articles: How Scientists Familiarize their Communities with New Approaches and Epistemic Objects’ (in Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800, ed. by Mary S. Morgan, Kim M. Hajek, and Dominic J. Berry, Cambridge University Press, 2022); and ‘Gene’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022).

The topic of factual narrative has seen renewed interest recently. This project works towards an account of factual narrative based on the relation of the story-world of a narrative to what might be called the practice-world of the agents that the narrative concerns. The account seeks to make sense of the observed varied framing of events through narratives, and of the mismatch of the events in a story vis-à-vis the real-world events that the narrative purports to represent. These issues of narrative representation have arisen independently in work on historiography and on scientific writing. The project starts from the latter and builds on previous work on the question of how research articles represent the research process (Meunier, ‘Research Narratives and Narratives of Nature in Scientific Articles: How Scientists Familiarize their Communities with New Approaches and Epistemic Objects’, in Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800, ed. by Mary S. Morgan, Kim M. Hajek, and Dominic J. Berry, Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Through the notion of a practice-world, the proposed account emphasizes reference over similarity in the relation between a story and a represented world. However, the focus of the extension of the account will be on personal narrative as found in everyday accounts of events as well as in autobiographical writing. By discussing the way in which factual narrative reduces reality, and addressing the significance of the degree of detail given in narrative, the project also contributes to the current ICI research foci on reduction and scale.

The view that experimentation always follows reasoning and serves to test hypotheses, and that philosophy has nothing to say about the origin of hypotheses, has been abandoned by most philosophers of science, who have become much more interested, instead, in the sources of the contents of reasoning and found that they emerge from situated interactions of scientists with their material and social environments.

While the objects of investigation have a life of their own – in biology, this is quite literally true –, thus generating an element of surprise, unprecedented results, and thus scientific novelty, the unexpected properties of epistemic things can only become visible within the constrained regime of a planned and controlled inquiry, pursued to a well-defined end. Accordingly, biology advances (in a manner which not necessarily implies progress) exactly as a result of the encounter of methodological activity and the living materials under investigation.

This project takes a closer look at the other side of this encounter: bios. What exactly happens if the living things under investigation do not conform to the expectations implied in the inquiry? What changes when the research material is alive as opposed to non-living matter, which, after all, also exhibits unanticipated properties when methodically scrutinized? Can the difference be grasped in terms of irreducible individuality, a certain spontaneity, agency, or other features that distinguish living organisms from non-living matter (while agency, however, has been ascribed to the latter as well)? Do these ascriptions imply that we need a (philosophical) understanding of living things that is independent of scientific accounts, in order to describe how a scientific understanding emerges? Or is it the very fact that the living material does not conform to classificatory or causal categories of science that reveals its nature? And, finally, what to make of the fact that researchers themselves are living beings, acting and reasoning in an embodied manner?

The proposed project is part of an ongoing investigation in the genealogy and structure of the plurality of disciplinary perspectives in the life sciences. The method employed is to compare from a historical point of view the role parts and properties of organisms play in different disciplines and the ways they are individuated through representational practices. The comparative character of the larger project allows showing how the relevant categories in a discipline result from specific practices, how different perspectives within the life-sciences interact and change, and how they are embedded into cultural practices in a broader sense.

Following previous work that focused on anatomy, embryology, genetics and medicine, the partial project pursued at the ICI focuses on the reconfiguration of taxonomic and functional interpretations of parts and properties of organisms through evolutionary theory. By tracking this process from the eighteenth century through its interaction with the emergence of the concepts and practices of genetics, the study will contribute to a reconstruction of today’s configuration of perspectives.