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

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.

Peter Howlett is an expert on the economic history of the First and Second World Wars and contributed the text for the official history: Fighting with Figures. Dr Howlett's publications also explore international economic growth and convergence since 1870 and the development of internal labor markets and have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as the Economic History Review, Explorations in Economic History and Business History. He teaches at the London School of Economics and is Secretary of the Economic History Society.

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 (Cambridge, 1990), The Foundations of Econometric Analysis (Cambridge, 1995, co-edited with David F. Hendry), and Models as Mediators (Cambridge, 1999, co-edited with Margaret Morrison). Professor Morgan's account of scientific modeling 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.