This chapter examines the criteria exposed by Stephen Jay Gould’s original paper on just-so stories to sustain such a charge. I show that Gould’s concerns were neither directed to narrative explanations nor were they ineluctably linked to their narrative quality. Then I analyse how advocates of narrative science have met the challenge. I identify two basic defensive approaches: the vindication of explanatory narratives in cases where the historical, contingent and causally complex nature of the phenomena demand a narrative approach and an unveiling strategy showing how there’s a narrative behind each law-like generalization or nomological explanatory formula. The chapter’s concentration on the argumentative moves of the discussants helps clarify their positions. Moreover, the argumentative quality of their object of study (scientific reason-giving practices) is also emphasized. I claim that the dialectical requirement of openness to collective survey and discussion is what may prevent just-so charges for any kind of explanatory model.

This chapter compares work done by Hugh Hamshaw Thomas (1885–1962) in two domains. First, in palaeobotany; second, in military intelligence in the First and Second World Wars. In each, Thomas investigated landscape processes using fragmentary visual evidence: plant evolution from fossils, enemy behaviour from aerial photographs. I propose we understand the connection between those domains by drawing together two, largely separate, scholarly discussions: (i) on the construction and evidential use of photographic archives; (ii) on evidence and causal explanations in the historical sciences. Through analysis of Thomas’s palaeobotanical and military work I situate narrative as the central and unifying principle of a practice in which neither evidence collection nor explanatory accounts were prior. This unifying ‘narrative practice’ was reticulate, multi-scalar and dynamic, as revealed by contemporary figures of speech that sought to describe it (working ‘like Sherlock Holmes’, ‘reading the book of nature’, thinking ‘like a river’).