Mariona Miyata-Sturm

Scientists regularly appeal to broadly aesthetic qualities such as elegance, beauty, and simplicity when evaluating theories. For example, the geologist Émile Argand said that “the elegance with which drift theory explains these significant facts … is certainly a strong point in its favour” and the physicist Paul Dirac said about general relativity that its “real foundations come from the great beauty of the theory”. But how can aesthetics be epistemically relevant? In this thesis, I present an account according to which aesthetic experiences can function as signals of epistemic value. Very roughly, it says that aesthetic feelings concerning scientific theories are the upshots of metacognitive processes which respond to features of epistemic value and signal the success of one’s cognitive engagement with theory and evidence. Through a detailed case study of the role of aesthetics in the development and acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics and by providing an explanation of how aesthetic experiences can be epistemically valuable, I show that there is reason for optimism about the role of aesthetic considerations in science: aesthetic pleasure is a moderately good indicator of epistemic success.

Aesthetic considerations played a substantial and positive role in the development and acceptance of plate tectonics, the modern theory of the earth’s major geological features and the unifying framework of the earth sciences. Here I give an overview of how aesthetics influenced plate tectonics and take a detailed look at a handful of examples from this history where elegance and simplicity tipped the balance in favour of a given hypothesis. I discuss some implications of this case study for extant accounts of aesthetics in science and argue that the positive role aesthetics played can be explained by recent accounts that posit an indirect and contingent link between knowledge and psychological mechanisms underlying aesthetic appreciation.

Scientists regularly invoke broadly aesthetic properties like elegance and simplicity when evaluating theories, but why should we expect aesthetic pleasure to signal an epistemic good? I argue that aesthetic judgements in science are best understood as a special case of affective cognition, and that the feelings on which these judgements are based are the upshots of metacognitive monitoring of the quality of our engagement with theory and evidence. Finding a theory beautiful fallibly signals that it fits well with our background knowledge and that it’s neither artificially adjusted to accommodate otherwise disconfirming evidence nor fitted to noise in the data, which makes aesthetic pleasure a good heuristic for theory evaluation.