What is a Beautiful Experiment? From Design to Result
In this talk I explore the aesthetic dimensions of scientific experimentation, addressing specifically the question how aesthetic features enter the construction, evaluation and reception of an experiment. I highlight the relationship between experiments and artistic acts in the early years of the Royal Society where experiments do not serve only epistemic aims, but also aim to generate feelings of awe and pleasure. I turn to analysing which aspects of experiments are appreciated aesthetically, identifying several contenders, from the ability of an experiment to uncover nature’s beauty, to encapsulating original designs and human creativity. Following this analysis, I focus on the notion of beauty: what makes an experiment beautiful? Several common qualities are explored, from the simplicity and economy of the experiment, to the significance of the experimental results.
Ines Schindler (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)
Does science need emotion? An exploration of the role of aesthetic emotions in science
It might seem that rational thought and logic rather than intuition and emotion are the backbone of science. However, most if not all scientists at some point have been enticed by a beautifully crafted line of argument, have stopped to look at a particularly elegant figure on a poster, or have been fascinated by an unexpected outcome of an experiment. As I will argue in my talk, such phenomena can be conceptualized and studied as aesthetic experiences. Aesthetics is concerned with how objects, events, and ideas are evaluated based on the pleasure taken in their sensory perception and resulting cognitive processing. After introducing the construct “aesthetic emotions” (as defined by Menninghaus et al., 2019) as those emotions that are predictive of aesthetic evaluations, I will present our most recent work on the Four Aesthetic Feeling States (FAFES) Model. The model includes four factors—pleasingness, captivation, affection, and negative evaluation—that each combine a set of aesthetic emotions with overlapping emotion components. The role of these feeling states and associated emotions in evaluating processes and outcomes of scientific inquiry will be explored with a specific look to how they might enhance or hinder scientific progress.
Luana Poliseli (Konrad Lorenz Institute)
Imagining, modeling, and understanding during real-time scientific practice
Imaginative processes play an important role in distinct moments of the scientific inquiry. Albeit vastly discussed in the context of scientific discoveries and explanation construction, when concerning the context of scientific understanding, imagination is still peripherally addressed. Furthermore, scientific understanding as a subject of inquiry has become widely discussed in philosophy of science but is often addressed through case studies from the history of science. Even though these historical reconstructions engage with details of scientific practice, they usually provide only limited information about how imagination relates to the formation of understanding in the ongoing process of model and theory construction. Through a qualitative ethnographic study of an ecological research practice, I present a model representing the formation of scientific understanding exposing some main features of its process: its gradual formation, its relations to skills and imagination, and its knowledge selectivity. I intend to show that imaginative processes, through the development of internal mental models, relates to the pragmatic understanding of modeling as an epistemic mediator that enables the formation of understanding in scientific practice.
Alice Murphy (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
"Seeing" in Understanding
An overlooked source of aesthetic value in science is the relation between the scientific content of a model, thought experiment or diagram, and the way in which that content is handled through its formal features. This, I argue, is a genuine aesthetic value which has epistemic pay offs, and I flesh out these pay offs in terms of how an appropriate fit between form and content can aid the imagination and contribute to scientific understanding.
The focus of my talk will be on the links between imagination (especially mental imagery) and understanding. A recent debate concerns what is meant by “imagination” in the scientific context. Salis and Frigg (2020) argue that it is the propositional imagination only that is relevant to scientific practice. However, their focus appears to be on imagination as a route to knowledge, and they do not consider other epistemic goods such as understanding. Similarly, while the imagination literature has discussed the epistemic role of mental imagery, the focus has been on uses of imagination in gaining knowledge. This is especially interesting since accounts of understanding in science frequently characterize understanding as “seeing” how things fit together, yet such accounts do not engage with the imagination literature.
My aim is to bring these debates together in order to get clearer on the links between understanding and “seeing”. I’ll explore the ways in which mental imagery might contribute to the grasping of some theory or phenomenon, and I’ll end by discussing how strong we should regard this connection between mental imagery and understanding in light of issues concerning mere feelings of understanding and aphantasia; the reduced ability to create conscious mental imagery.
Anatolii Kozlov (University of Geneva)
What One Discovers Pretending to Be a Molecule? On Imagination, Pretence, and Models
How does scientific imagination work? The fictionalists suggest that scientific models are analogous to literary fiction, and, for example, thinking about the DNA double-helix model is epistemically alike to thinking about Hamlet, as both are fictional entities. Further, they suggest that a specific type of imagination is required for the use of scientific models, the so-called propositional imagination, which is associated with pretence and games of make-believe. In contrast, sensory imagination, associated with occurrences of mental images, on a number of accounts, is neither necessary nor sufficient for using scientific models. Here I ask a question that seems to be overlooked by fictionalists, namely what type of imagination is required for creating scientific models? I show that the often-employed Waltonian framework of pretence is unable to answer this question. By drawing a comparison between science and art, I show that, in fact, sensory imagination typically plays a crucial role in creating fictional representations. Further, I reconstruct the development of the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model of allosteric regulation to pin down some key steps of their thinking process. From this reconstruction I move on to suggest a more general conclusion that the model-building process requires imagination first and foremost to be productive, that is to be able to cast a web of fictive representations aimed at responding to concrete epistemic challenges. I argue that both propositional and sensory imagination can uniquely contribute to such productivity.