The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding

The publication of The Aesthetics of Science invites us to reflect, beyond the range of individual arguments advanced in it, on the general aims that motivate the production of an edited volume like this. There seems to be a spectrum of possible commitments when one addresses the role of aesthetic values in science. At one extreme, the spheres of the aesthetic and the epistemic are completely separated from one another, with no meaningful interaction between them. So if allusions to the beauty of a theory are to be found in science, these should be understood as merely subjective, emotional responses of scientists in the context of discovery, without standing on the epistemic justification of the theory. At the other extreme, aesthetic and epistemic values belong to the same kind; they are indistinguishable from each other in practice. In this view, references to the beauty of a scientific theory are understood as entailing an epistemic assessment—that is, they are taken as appraisals of the good performance or empirical adequacy of the theory. These two extreme views have something important in common: they render the project of further examining the role of aesthetics in scientific practice a futile task. As one disregards aesthetic considerations and the other translates them into epistemic assessments, they fail to recognize as a genuine philosophical problem the fact that, throughout the history of science, model evaluation and theory choice have been persistently formulated in terms of elegance, harmony, beauty or the capacity to inspire awe.