The Aesthetics of Science

Beauty, Imagination and Understanding

Milena Ivanova, Steven French, Milena Ivanova, Steven French

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429638558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances—such as thought experiments and visual aids—and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories.

Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding.

The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

1
Introduction to the Volume

Milena Ivanova and Steven French

1 Introduction

Aesthetic judgments feature prominently in scientific practice. Scientific theories are often compared to works of art, with scientists likening the process of constructing a theory to that of creating art pieces and even in choosing one theory over another they may invoke aesthetic considerations. Given these features of scientific practice, the questions naturally arise: What are the inter-relationships between aesthetics and science? How can the role of aesthetic judgments in scientific practice be justified? This volume engages with these questions and considers in detail the status of various features of such practice from an aesthetics-related perspective, including thought experiments and models, visual aids and representations, together with the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of theories, the experiences of beauty and the sublime in science and how they affect and shape scientific practice, and the nature of scientific creativity and imagination in general.

2 History of Engagement

Engaging in the aesthetics of science has certainly not always been a topic of pursuit in the philosophy of science. During the positivist dominated years aesthetics and science were kept apart, and there was little value seen in the engagement between the two disciplines. For one, aesthetic considerations, if indeed relevant to science, were deemed to be psychological and subjective in nature, and though they might be employed in the process by which scientists come up with ideas, they were regarded to have no bearing upon the formal properties of the theory, that is, how the theory relates to the world. Hans Reichenbach’s famous distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification conveys exactly this point: it is irrelevant how scientists come up with new ideas, whether they dream them up in their sleep or have a sudden illumination whilst taking a stroll, what matters is whether the reasons used can justify one’s belief that the theory corresponds to the world. Reichenbach claimed that “It would be a vain attempt to construct a theory of knowledge which is at the same time logically complete and in strict correspondence with the psychological process of thought” (1938: 5). Thus, from the time of the Vienna Circle through to recent years, aesthetic considerations were not the focus of philosophical work. If acknowledged at all as featuring in the practice of science, such considerations were clearly demoted to the context of discovery, rendering them not part of the rational justification of scientific theories.

3 The Significance of Representation

Certain philosophical developments over the last decades have paved the way for departing from the constraints of Reichenbach’s distinction and engaging systematically with the relationship between aesthetics and science. One contributing factor has been the popularity of the semantic approach to scientific theories and the increased interest in the function of scientific models. While the syntactic approach that dominated the years of logical positivism took theories to be sets of propositions that are truth apt, the alternative semantic, or model-theoretic approach, as famously outlined by Patrick Suppes (1960), introduced the notion of representation as the aim of theories. How theories represent the world became the central question, with many commentators drawing analogies with the representational nature of artworks and scientific theories explicitly compared to such artworks. Bas van Fraassen’s (2008) seminal work Scientific Representation engaged systematically with the notion of representation in art and in science, and the edited collection by Frigg and Hunter (2010) From Mimesis to Representation, further explored the relationship between scientific models and works of fiction. The recent volume Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art: Bringing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science Together (2017), edited by Bueno et al., gave additional momentum to this engagement, opening further avenues for exploration such as the act of interpretation in art and science and the question of whether there can be a science of aesthetics. Further connections between art and science were also introduced in the work of Catherine Elgin (1991) and others, who compared literary works to thought experiments, showing how our understanding can be advanced through notions such as exemplification, for example.

4 Beauty in Science

Beyond the notion of representation and the comparison of scientific products such as theories and thought experiments to artworks, philosophers of science have also focused on the notion of beauty itself. The work of James McAllister, Beauty and Revolutions in Science, set the stage for understanding the notion of beauty within the historical evolution of scientific theories. It offered an account of how scientists come to form aesthetic judgments and how their training affects their aesthetic appreciation. McAllister also provided a justification for the idea that aesthetic considerations can play an epistemic role. While many scientific realists, contemporary and past, have tried to identify the theoretical virtues that correlate with the truthlikeness of theories, McAllister and others after him explicitly recognised that these virtues are often conveyed in aesthetic terms and noted that scientists explicitly use aesthetic language when they appraise them, recognising the need to give an account of the aesthetic aspect of these judgments. Recent developments have seen a renewed appreciation for the role of certain values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories, as exemplified in Samuel Schindler’s (2018) Theoretical Virtues in Science: Uncovering Reality Through Theory. Furthermore, there is recognition that when scientists engage with theories that they consider beautiful they are indeed reporting genuine aesthetic experiences (Ivanova 2017 a).

5 Science and Creativity

In addition to these emphases on representation and aesthetic qualities, historians of science, psychologists and neuroscientists have become invested in understanding the notion of creativity. Historians try to understand how scientists of the past came up with the new theories that revolutionalised their fields, psychologists try to understand what traits creative people have in common and how such traits are formed, while neuroscientists have focused on understanding the neurological functions involved in the exhibition of creative behaviour. The departure from the ‘inspirationalist’ accounts of creativity, which deemed inspiration to be a mysterious process available only to a select set of individuals, the ‘great minds’, has opened the door to the exploration of the creativity and the imagination in terms of computation, as advanced in the work of Margaret Boden. Here again the connection between art and science has become apparent, with creativity being highly valued in both the domain of art and the domain of science.

6 From Aesthetics to Philosophy of Science (and Back Again)

This volume extends this increased engagement between aesthetics and science of recent years and introduces new avenues for exploration. The collection focuses on the status of aesthetic judgments with regard to the products of science, the status of scientific theories seen as constructions of scientific imagination, the experience of beauty but also the sublime in science, how aesthetic considerations inform and shape our activities and aims in science and, finally, the question of scientific creativity. There are important dimensions to science practice whose nature departs from the logical positivist’s recipe of ‘logic and experience’, both in the context of discovery and justification, and entering the field of aesthetics, that need to be systematically explored. For one, scientists often make explicit aesthetic judgments with regard to the objects they study, the products of their activities as well as those very activities seem to be guided by aesthetic values. The phenomena studied in science are claimed to be beautiful, such as the diffraction of light rays or solar eclipses. More significantly, we find claims that the products of scientists’ activities themselves exemplify aesthetic values, with physicists typically claiming theories such as Einstein’s relativity theory or Newton’s mechanics to be beautiful, Rutherford’s experiments on the atom to be beautiful, Watson, Crick and Franklin’s double helix model of DNA molecules to be beautiful and so on. And the very construction of a theory or an experiment can be claimed to be guided by aesthetic considerations. Since aesthetic judgments enter in all these levels of theorising, there is a need to understand the nature of these aesthetic judgments and the role they play. What are the set of aesthetic judgments that guide scientists? Are they fixed once and for all, and across disciplines, or are they largely contingent, relevant to a framework, school of thought and time period?

Debates in aesthetics have aimed to resolve the very same question when it comes to artworks. According to objectivism, aesthetic judgments have validity across individuals, time frameworks and societies, meaning that there is a fact of the matter whether a certain object is beautiful or not. Objectivists argue that aesthetic judgments can be regarded as independent of subjective taste and fashions and point to works of art that have continuously been appreciated cross culturally and through time. For instance, we value the works of Callicrates, Polykleitos and Homer today as they were valued in antiquity, supporting the idea that our aesthetic judgments are objective and do not change with time or across societies. On the other hand, some artworks can initially be regarded as ‘ugly’ or aesthetically displeasing, but gain ground later, suggesting that aesthetic judgments can be subjective, contingent and varying across time, communities and individuals. The infamous reception of the Eiffel tower exemplifies this point. Most artists and architects in the nineteenth century wanted the tower demolished, calling it a ‘monstrosity’ over the Parisian skyline, but only a decade later the tower became a symbol of modern architecture and regarded as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Similarly in science, some values seem to gain ground after they are introduced in the scientific community. For instance, symmetry was not praised before relativity theory, elegance was irrelevant before the mathematical formalisation of theories, culminating with Newton’s development of the calculus and his theory of gravity. What shapes the community’s response to aesthetic qualities of theories and what roles these can play are questions that are beginning to receive more systematic attention in the contemporary literature.

Another aspect of productive engagement between aesthetics and philosophy of science concerns creativity and the imagination. We value original ideas and the creative process responsible for their generation. When it comes to artworks, we do not ascribe value to copies or forgeries; we value originals. In science, we praise and admire those who discover new theories, phenomena and design new experiments or instruments, those who produce new proofs rather than those scientists who replicate experiments, or come up with a theory second or third. The reward structure in science reflects this phenomenon; credit attribution goes to those who discover first. We grant Nobel Prizes for new discoveries, while not much value is given to those who replicate experiments, for instance, leading to problems such as the replication crisis (Heesen 2018). As the sociologist Robert Merton reflected, science is governed by the priority rule, the fight to be the first who comes up with new ideas. How do artists and scientists do this?

Galileo, Newton, Curie, Einstein and Poincare are the usual examples given of creative minds, geniuses raised to the status of mythical super-heroes endowed with creativity and imagination that transformed the field and our understanding of the world. But was there anything special about these scientists? Creativity has been the focus of much attention in aesthetics. Earlier ‘inspirationalist’ accounts took creativity to be due to divine or special inspiration available to very few individuals, but more recently systematic work in psychology and neuroscience has illuminated the creative process and the social and cultural aspects that enable some individuals to develop creativity. In the work of Boden (2003) and others creativity is understood as the exploration of conceptual spaces and the ability to connect already known ideas, with value being ascribed only to those connections that are historically novel. Within this new way of thinking about creativity, interesting questions arise, such as whether creative individuals share the same traits, how creativity can be cultivated, and how an individual’s environment, social and cultural background and resources available to them can affect that creativity. This also generates questions regarding credit distribution and recognition that creativity could be explored from the perspective of groups rather than individuals (Currie 2019). Interesting new dimensions in the study of creativity has also recently been raised in the work of virtue epistemology, where creativity is construed as an epistemic virtue whose instantiation in an individual leads to epistemic success. A troubling issue for virtue epistemology is to reconcile the descriptive and normative aspect: as a matter of fact, biographical accounts often reveal that creative people exemplify a lot of epistemic vice, from self-centeredness, dogmatism and ego-centric bias, to egotism and narcissism. How are we to reconcile the idea of the virtuous knower with the descriptive aspect that new revolutionary ideas that lead to scientific progress and epistemic success are a product of epistemic vice? The problem opens the door to reconsidering the notion of creativity within both virtue and social epistemology and exploring the creative process from the dimension of groups and individuals.

The new engagement between philosophers of science and aesthetics has also motivated work in the history of philosophy of science and the search for ideas that predate the logical positivist distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification. Here philosophers have uncovered interesting work on aesthetic aspects of science developed before or during the logical positivist movement, from Dirac’s arguments on beauty by Graham Farmelo, to Praisly Livingston’s revival of Poincare’s sophisticated account of creativity and scientific discovery, to David Stump’s revival of Pierre Duhem’s use of ‘good sense’ in theory choice and Milena Ivanova’s recent reconstruction of Poincare’s account of beauty in science. These works show that there was a systematic engagement in the early twentieth century with the notion of creativity in the context of scientific discovery, the notion of beauty as a guide and evaluator in scientific reasoning, and the role of aesthetic sensibility in scientific decision making, all of which can be productively reintroduced into our contemporary engagement in this field.

As two of the contributors to this volume, Arcangeli and Dokic, note, ‘[a]esthetics seems to enter science on at least three different levels:

• (i) The objects of scientific enquiry (such as cells, mu-mesons, and numbers) may instantiate aesthetic values.
• (ii) The products of science (such as theories, conjectures, and models) may instantiate aesthetic values.
• (iii) The scientific practice (such as constructing and evaluating theories, and designing experiments) may be guided by aesthetic experiences and judgements.’

The contributions in this book focus primarily on (ii) and (iii), the products or ‘outputs’ of science, including not just theories and models but also thought experiments, for example, and the practices, covering, in addition to theory discovery and justification, the presentation of theories at lectures and seminars. We’ll also look at the practitioners of science, not just in terms of what they do and produce but the virtues and vices that they exhibit. In doing so we shall address various aspects of the above issues from a variety of perspectives that, we hope, will further advance the engagement between aesthetics and philosophy of science in general.

7 Summary of Contributions

In the opening contribution to the volume, Catherine Z. Elgin addresses head-on ‘the problem of the aesthetic’ in the context of science: is there any epistemically good reason to prefer a theory that possesses certain aesthetic qualities to one that does not? And what are we focusing on when we make such assessments? Extending a view found in the philosophy of art, Elgin suggests that aesthetic responses to theories consist in the apprehension and appreciation of ‘scientifically significant forms in a logical space’, where the nature of these forms is context dependent. Furthermore, she argues, the role of the relevant aesthetic factors is not merely instrumental nor is it truth-conducive; rather these factors act as ‘gatekeepers’ to the acceptability of theories. In her earlier work she has developed the view that an understanding of a given topic consists of a systematically linked body of information in reflective equilibrium that is grounded in fact, is responsive to evidence and enables non-trivial inference and argument about a range of phenomena. And insofar as an aesthetic factor is ineliminably integral to such a network of scientific commitments, then it is epistemically justified.

Thus she considers the role of symmetry in modern science, regarded as an aesthetically pleasing feature. The recent history of physics demonstrates how scientists prefer symmetry-preserving theories and this preference clearly affects their behaviour in accepting or rejecting new hypotheses or results in general. Another factor is systematicity; as she puts it, ‘[w]e want our fabric of scientific commitments to be tightly woven’. Yet another is simplicity, notoriously complicated as she points out. Different kinds of simplicity may be traded off against one another and come to the fore in different contexts. Nevertheless, construing it as an aesthetic factor helps explain scientists’ preferences for simpler theories and models.

As she goes on to note, such aesthetic considerations may be initially tenable and thereby constrain future theorising. Candidate theories that display these qualities will be deemed to be acceptable over those that do not. However, every component of that systematic body of information in equilibrium is up for grabs and it may of course turn out that the cost of insisting on a particular quality is too high, so that its scope must be reduced or it is abandoned altogether. Conversely, a particular factor may gain in importance, as in the case of symmetry in the shift from classical to quantum physics. Thus aesthetic factors play a regulatory role, helping to shape our accounts and frame our understanding.

The way in which the aesthetic features of scientific ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to the Volume
• 2 Epistemic Gatekeepers: The Role of Aesthetic Factors in Science
• 3 Getting the Picture: Towards a New Account of Scientific Understanding
• 4 Imagination, Aesthetic Feelings, and Scientific Reasoning
• 5 Beauty, Truth and Understanding
• 6 A Plea for the Sublime in Science
• 7 How Can Loveliness Be a Guide to Truth? Inference to the Best Explanation and Exemplars
• 8 The Aesthetic and Literary Qualities of Scientific Thought Experiments
• 9 Epistemic Radicals and the Vice of Arrogance as a Counterfeit to the Virtue of Assured Epistemic Ambition
• 10 Performance and Practice: Situating the Aesthetic Qualities of Theories
• List of Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index