Hi Paul,

As a humanist, I'm not sure I'm getting the distinction you claim between these two modes of scholarly communication, "storytelling" and "story telling." 

They each seem to involve two distinct audiences (expert vs. non-expert) and distinct  purposes.  But I think that both modes here are rhetorical to the extent that the speaker accommodates her language and explanations to suit the intended audience's understanding, even if this accommodation is largely tacit and unconscious in the case of disciplinary conversations. 

So here's "storytelling," which seems to consist of the instructor's overtly rhetorical and pedagogical (post hoc?) explanations of disciplinary subject matter:

By "storytelling" I understand, as I think most people do, the practice of taking something that may or may not be itself engaging to an audience by dressing it up with connections, metaphors, and perhaps a narrative structure intended to make it more entertaining/amusing/accessible. As an educational practice this can sometimes work, but it has problems (such as the misleading messages inherent in "anthropomorphizing")

The interesting paradox I see here is that it is the "entertaining" and "narrative" dimension of the teacher's language that you find somewhat suspicious, even while you are celebrating your master-trope of "story," as in "story telling," which it turns out may not involve any narrative at all (see below). 

Metaphors, of course, can always "mislead" or "create problems" (rhetoric is tricky in the way it operates), but the fantasy of a transparent, perfectly dependable language free of figuration or rhetoric has been a recurring fantasy of scientific discourse since the days of Sprat and the Royal Society.  But how much control does the language user, even the scientist as language user, have over the meanings of her own metaphors?  Scientists, after all, must use language as they find it, and have no more control over their own and others' language than other kinds of users.

Your counter-term, "story telling" seems to involve disciplinary conversations but your description of them as "stories" even when they are non-narrative, visual, statistical, etc., indicates that you have transformed "story" into a metaphor for scholarly communications generally, in whatever forms these exchanges might take:

Stories are the way we all, whether academics or not, summarize observations in order to make sense of the world. They may be anthropomorphic or not, they may be cast in narrative form or not, but they have important features in common regardless. They are always context dependent, ie they reflect a restricted set of observations and so have an "authorial perspective." And they are, for the same reasons, always revisable, subject to change given new observations.

Now, once again, I have no problem with such a metaphor, which is both illuminating and partial in the way that all well-chosen metaphors are.  And there is no rhetorical point to be gained by trying to refute someone else's metaphor. 

But what I would ask you about would be the "unconceived alternative" of your figure of "story," the blindness produced by its insight, which to me is the relation of your supercharged notion of scholarly "story" to collective, scholarly, or disciplinary procedures of argument, debate, assessments, judgments, etc.?  In what ways does "story" include or not include this process of collective expert deliberation, argument, and judgment? 

The flat-out relativist position, which I don't think you would accept, would say that we all have stories, and one is as good as another.  If a high school biology teacher in a public school wants to teach Creationism as a "theory" alongside other "theories," then fine.  This is the "anything goes," position, a position that represents science simply as a matter of persuasion (not rhetoric), and lacking any basis in fact, evidence, or reasoned argument.

If we assume, however, that knowledge in different disciplines is produced by very specific linguistic frameworks of discussion, deliberation, evidence, argumentation, etc., then we can begin to articulate the kinds of linguistic bridges that might allow the different expert communities to communicate with one another, advance and revise each others' understandings, and to address (or build) the publics which might find their knowledge relevant or helpful.