Mariona Miyata Sturm: 'Effortless elegance and other epistemic pleasures'
Abstract: When evaluating theories, scientists regularly appeal to a theory’s elegance, simplicity, or lack of ad hoc elements. Do we have reason to think that such broadly aesthetic features are epistemically relevant? In this talk, I present a new picture of aesthetics in science which relates scientists’ aesthetic experiences to epistemic theoretical virtues. In brief, it says that aesthetic feelings regarding scientific theories are the felt outputs of (meta)cognitive processes responding to epistemically valuable features of theories, allowing these feelings to function as proxies for epistemic virtues. For example, feelings of elegance arise when we effortlessly ‘connect the dots’, and signal that the theory strikes a good balance between simplicity and informativeness. I illustrate the explanatory power of this picture by applying it to examples from 20th-century earth science, and explain how it fits within a larger framework for understanding the role of aesthetic considerations in science which I call ‘the metacognitive account.
