Volume 2, Issue 1: Harmonizing philosophy of science: The Aesthetics of Science

Harmonizing philosophy of science: The Aesthetics of Science

Milena Ivanova and Steven French (eds.), The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, pp. viii + 214. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-367-14114-1. £120.00. 

Both science and its philosophical understanding, namely the philosophy of science, are rich fields for the interested researcher. Scientific objects, scientific constructions, scientific practices, but even scientists themselves could be studied in many ways, utilizing different tools of various scientific fields. During the twentieth century ontological, epistemological and even moral questions dominated the interest of philosophers; thus the most important questions were always related to the truth or usefulness of theories. (Moral, sociological and cultural aspects of the scientific endeavor, in fact, became apparent and fertile only at a relatively later stage.)

            Scientific issues, however, are often entangled with less cognitive issues, and even scientists recalled that while doing science, aesthetic considerations became attached to the creative process. Although the aesthetics of science was a recurring theme in the second half of the twentieth century, philosophy of science curriculums and handbooks still either neglect the topic or provide only a negligible space for ‘further possible studies’. This is perhaps due to a well-known distinction in the philosophy of science, namely due to the context/discovery distinction. According to that, one might easily argue that aesthetic considerations might be relevant in the context of discovering scientific issues: in the process of making a discovery or constructing a theory, one might be guided by many subjective, contingent and irrational forces. You might pursue a certain scientific theory due to being attracted by its elegance and harmony presented by it. But at the end of the day, logic and rational justificatory processes come to the foreground. However nice a theory could be, it won’t make it true.

            Things are quickly changing, however, and a new edited volume has arrived about The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding, by Milena Ivanova and Steven French. With its ten chapters (including a helpful summary-like introduction), AoS is both a nice state-of-the-art type of work and a reveling novel contribution to our understanding of how science works. 

            But what are the question and problems here at all? If we assume that the aim of science is to track truth and serve as such theories that adequately represent the world as it is on the fundamental level, then do we really think that it matters whether a theory is beautiful in any ways? The problem of the aesthetics of science is not that simple, of course. Nonetheless, it is not at all obvious either where the real problems shall lie. One might quote many internationally recognized and respected scientists and scientists-turned-philosophers who explicitly claimed that there is some relation between beauty/elegance and the truth of a theory. AoS is filled with many such quotes from Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Pierre Duhem, and Henri Poincaré. In their personal reports, they talked about how they have found beauty, elegance, charm, and attractiveness in certain theories, and how they based their decisions regarding the choice between theories on aesthetics values.

            According to this idea, if there are competing theories, grasping experiential matters equally, and having the same prediction, then we shall choose the more elegant solution as it might track truth, or get closer to the truth. We might open any chapters of the volume, such quotations from renowned physicists might be found there. If this is the case, namely that the leading physicists of their age made their aesthetics interest explicit in theory choice and formation, then philosophers shall take the issue seriously as well. AoS is an important contemporary attempt from leading philosophers to achieve that.

            Although the volume is not structured into different parts, the papers’ themes and focuses still collect them into smaller groups:

(1) General, reference-type papers

(2) Papers about understanding

(3) Special novel approaches

            Besides the stage-setter introduction, papers that belong to (1) raises the general question with which we started this review, namely how aesthetic values could influence scientific work at all. Catherine Z. Elgin addresses, for example, the question of whether aesthetic factors are truth-conducive, that is, whether they have any cognitive role in scientific reasoning at all. She argues that they are “gatekeepers”, certain regulative ideas to shape our reasoning and guide our epistemic capacities in theory building and theory choice. 

            Milena Ivanova’s paper is a transitional paper; she not just gave a really neat summary of the role of aesthetic factors in general, but also showed that their real role belongs to the category of understanding. That is, our aesthetic preferences are not directed toward the world, or better, they do not “reflect anything about the world in itself” (p. 100), rather they tell something about our own mind and cognitive make-up. 

            There are a few more papers that are connected to the notion of “understanding” (2). In fact, that is one of the most interesting and fascinating issues of the volume, namely that aesthetic factors are not, or not just cognitive-related issues, but rather they are closely linked to our understanding of the world and of scientific matters. Understanding is a tricky notion, not much less tricky than aesthetic notions themselves; nonetheless “understanding” also experiences a new revival in the community (after von Wright’s initial stage-setting account of “explanation versus understanding”, we are finally in the age of understanding ‘understanding’). Among these papers here are Letitia Meynell’s who promotes a “pictorial account” of scientific understanding relating it to aesthetic ideals, making a move towards a more flexible account as opposed to traditional representational and propositional accounts of understanding. Cain Todd follows a similar trend, with slightly different moves.

            There is a nice rupture among the papers about understanding. Some of them invoke the newest empirical/experiential literature about aesthetic cognition and try to motivate their own account by pointing out that even neuroscientists were able to show how the visual experience of certain scientific objects are correlated to the scientists’ neurological correlate of the beauty-experience. Despite these trends, Ivanova (pp. 87.ff) suggests taking into account non-empirical experiences of beauty and other aesthetic factors; she talks about certain intellectual values of aesthetics, more in line with Kant’s famous third critique than to other empirically-based neuro-accounts.

            If we guess that, however, we might be much far away from the truth. In fact, Margherita Arcangeli and Jérôme Dokic’s paper is connected to the other most important item of Kant’s third critique, namely to the sublime. They go beyond the usual suspects and try to highlight such issues that cannot be characterized as simple as positive or attractive. That land of friction and pulse is the domain of the sublime; a sublime experience has a two-faced character, namely, it is inspiring, refreshing, charming, but at the same time also terrifying, shocking, and shows the experiencers smallness in comparison. Thus, while it cannot be subsumed under the positive values at face value, it still has a strong motivational factor, and in fact, the authors shows that many of the scientists’ reports contain such contradictory elements that point towards the experience of the sublime in scientific practice. Thus their paper is a call to arms to widen the scope of the field and to embrace aesthetic pluralism in the context of the philosophy of science.

            Alexander Bird’s paper considers inference to the best explanation (IBE) and connects it to beauty. How does he do that? Well, Bird argues that in the context of IBE one might utilize Kuhn’s notion of exemplar: an exemplar is a method of solving problems, namely by recognizing patterns in a new situation and comparing it to some already known circumstances. That is, scientists often solve puzzles by connecting them to already known and solved issues. This process does not have well-based rules and cognitive determinants; thus relying on exemplars involves the subjective experience, judgment and personal capacities of the scientists. “These first-person similarities explain why scientific cognition using exemplars is often described using aesthetic terminology” (p. 142). In such cases, we use what we can, and aesthetic values turned out to be extremely helpful in determining exemplar relations, and thus arriving at the best explanation, and thus at the truth. So the acceptance of non-entirely-cognitive problem-solving methods in science means another field for aesthetical considerations.

            A representative of group three is Alice Murphey who argues that “[t]he value of thought experiments is that they provide us with a scenario that makes something complex easy to visualise and to grasp” (p. 149). Thought experiments are often described in aesthetic terms and thus a novel account of the art-science relations is established. One wonders how thought experiments and their semi-cognitive character might be related to exemplars and their aesthetic underpinnings. Going into the volume, thus, raises the feeling in the reader that aesthetic factors are way more important in science than usual stories entitles us to think. 

            In his paper, Matthew Kieran presents another particular or special issue. The topic of his paper is the context of epistemic vices and virtues. He starts from a nice and revealing correlation regarding epistemic vices (such as arrogance) and scientific novelty, innovation. Although one would expect that if a scientist instantiates epistemic vices, she would be erroneous, statistics show that the contrary is the case. Kieran’s explanation relates to the notion of “counterfeit”: arrogance and other similar vices seem to exhibit similar or even same behavioral patterns to such epistemic virtues as assured epistemic ambition. While the paper is indeed a helpful guide and narration of how vicious scientist might be extremely innovative and successful cognitively, the paper’s relevance to the aesthetic of science is only circumstantial through the notions of subjectivity, flexibility, and context-sensitivity (these notions are brought into play in the positive account of the paper about assured epistemic ambition). 

            The book is framed with another general(ly oriented) paper, but this time with a more specific approach, namely by Steven French’s paper on ‘performance and practice’. French argues that the ontology of theories shall be revisited, and we shall think about theories or the ‘grasping’ and utilization of theories as practices, similarly somewhat to works of art. By moving from a simple expressionist point of view (where symbolic presentations are expression of abstract theories from a third world), French takes an ever more radical move and argues that aesthetic claims, allegedly made about theories, such as “Relativity theory is elegant”, are “made true by the relevant practices, involving, for example, the ease of deduction of certain [...] statements [...]” (pp. 204-205).

            Closing the book, however, might leave the critical reader with a bad taste in his/her mouth. Most of the examples about the aesthetic in science are connected to Einstein and relativity theory. There are numerous quotations from Einstein where he claims that elegance and similar values guided and justified his research: reaching the required elegance might be an epistemic indicator when to stop thinking and reasoning. Einstein is a good example, of course, but not everybody is an Einstein, and thus not everyone can stop a debate by falling back on subjective aesthetics considerations. (Many could think that this style of reasoning is a form of arrogance – see Kieran’s chapter.)

            Furthermore, examples are usually given by reference to general theories such as “quantum mechanics”, “relativity theory”, “Newton’s mechanics”, “Darwin’s evolution” and so on. But it would have been helpful to get some actual “beautiful” equations to compare them to non-beautiful ones. The lack of such examples makes it harder to assess the real strength of the aesthetics of science. But one might consider this not as a weakness of the volume (this would be highly unfair, of course), but as a sign of the topic’s fertility for further research! Another such sign might be the relation between politics and aesthetics of science. Calling a theory beautiful, deep, harmonious, representing the attractiveness of the world order indeed sounds like a form of propaganda talk. As there was degenerative art in the twentieth century according to many totalitarian regimes, there were degenerative sciences and degenerative theories. Comparing their vocabularies and working mechanisms might mean another boost to the aesthetics of science.

            It is always hard to evaluate or assess an edited volume with many papers, often just loosely connected to each other. Nonetheless, The Aesthetics of Science obviously requires our attention and makes us sitting down and leaving our comfort zone to think about such factors as beauty, elegance, harmony, attractiveness and so on. There seems to be a consensus among the authors that aesthetic factors are not staying in a one-by-one correspondence to truth, certainty, and rightness. This claim could be easily dismissed anyway. But all of them agree to the point that aesthetic factors play a much more important role in theory construction, theory choice, and manipulation of theories than we would think after taking a regular science class. Although not all the papers take aesthetic issues into their foreground equally (this shows perhaps that too flexible and somewhat indefinite nature of the subject), all of them give us something to think about. Ivanova and French made a nice work as editors, the book contains negligible typos and similar editorial issues; the papers are quite consistent and follow a nice structure. Even if you are working on more technical issues in the philosophy of science, it would nice to read some of these papers to have a new and enlightening look on how our understanding of the actual work of science might be extended.

Adam Tamsa Tuboly

Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Supported by the MTA Lendulet Morals and Science Research Group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship.