Great ideas VS narrative

From: Powerful Ideas Need Love Too!
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This way of thinking and giving meaning to one's life and society in terms of stories and narratives is universal over all cultures, and is in our basic "wiring" as human beings. It is part of what we call "common sense." And it is the way most of the college students that NSF and I talked to had "learned science"--as isolated cases, stories that would be retrieved to deal with a similar situation, not as a system of inter related arguments about what we think we know and how well we think we know it. Story thinking won out. Claude Levi-Strauss and Seymour Papert have called this incremental isolated "natural" learning "bricolage"--which means making something by "tinkering around." This is one of the reasons that engineering predates science by thousands of years; some constructions can be accomplished gradually by trial and error without needing any grand explanations for why things work.

Yet if we look back over the last 400 years to ponder what ideas have caused the greatest changes in human society and have ushered in our modern era of democracy, science, technology and health care, it should be a bit of a shock to realize that none of these is in story form! Newton's treatise on the laws of motion, the force of gravity, and the behavior of the planets is set up as a sequence of arguments that imitate Euclid's books on geometry. All scientific papers since then are likewise given as special kinds of arguments, not stories.
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By Alan Kay (1995)