Gabriele Gramelsberger THE EPISTEMIC TEXTURE OF SIMULATED WORLDS

From this essay that appears in SIMULATION – PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE AND COGNITIVE METHOD by Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis, I have taken this last part:TOWARDS A NARRATOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC SIMULATIONS.

"If we regard scientific simulations as narrative textual structures, however singular, then a narratology of scientific simulation should be possible. We have learned from the narratology of literary text that narrative events possess a certain duration, even if these are not always ordered in a strict sequence, and that narratives are conditioned by certain omissions, reminiscences, and anticipations, as well as by a specific narrative schema. Analogously to literary genres ( detective fiction, novel, short story), the various types of simulations articulate diverse narrative schemata. The climate situation under description (how the climate is simulated) is based on the classical narrative schema of deterministic simulations of partial differential equations, while for example the monte carlo (mathematical formulae) simulations resort to a stochastic narrative schema that follows the law of large numbers." Gabriele Gramelsberge