Science and Narrative

I have had a number of posts recently (Cargo Cult Science, Baloney Detection Kit, Identifying Cognitive Pollution, It is only when facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps) that explore the intersection between pursuing truth in the pure abstract and pursuing truth in the context of the social enterprise – i.e. when you want to do business, when you want to arrive at a community decision, when the need to coordinate and negotiate the views and knowledge and opinions and instincts of many people together, all variously constrained by time, money, and motivation.

The pursuit of truth requires motivation, competition, accountability, transparency, empiricism. The pursuit of truth relies on the scientific method.

The pursuit of social agreement requires compromise, concessions, diligence, diplomacy, and discretion. The pursuit of social agreement relies on persuasion.

The pursuit of truth depends on the prosperity engendered by some minimum level of social agreement and social agreement is enriched by truths. But the intersect point between the two seems astonishingly small. How do we go about infusing our social discourse with the orientation of the scientific method and how do we equip the scientific method with more narrative persuasion?