This article is aimed at those interested in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the sciences—and this includes philosophers of science working out of the analytic tradition. Deleuze's writings are riddled with references to science and mathematics. And yet, the relation between these references and his philosophical thought is not well understood. In this essay, I investigate the nature of this relation—and I do so by asking whether it is naturalistic. Importantly, I draw on insights from contemporary philosophy of science (...) to contribute to a proper understanding of this issue. I show that and how commentators are hamstrung by their lack of engagement with the philosophy of science; I present an interpretation of Deleuze's philosophical project as attempting to articulate an immanent and primitive form of objective modality; I draw together parts of Deleuze's corpus that are relevant to his treatment of the sciences but are nonetheless rarely studied in conjunction (including his and Guattari's distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ science and his under-scrutinized statement of interest in ‘the metaphysics science needs’); and I propose a naturalistic interpretation of his engagements with science. (shrink)

Some experimental results in science are productively surprising or beautiful. Such results are disruptive in their epistemic nature: by violating epistemic expectations they mark the phenomenon at hand as worthy of further investigation. Could it be that there are emotions beyond these two which are also useful for the epistemic evaluation of scientific experiments? Here, I conduct a structured sociological survey to explore affective experiences in scientific experimental research. I identify that learning the results of an experiment is the high (...) emotional point in the experimenting process. Thus, experimental results can be challenging, beautiful, or boring, and they can worry, amuse, make one sad, and so on. They can also drive meta-cognitive evaluations as well as motivate specific research-related actions. From this, I advance two claims: that emotions beyond surprise and disruptive beauty are epistemically useful in empirical research, and that emotions help to overcome specific challenges of reasoning about new experimental results. (shrink)

Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be good. Given this, we should conclude (...) that beauty is not generally necessary or sufficient for epistemic value, and increasing beauty will not generally tend to increase epistemic value. (shrink)

This article starts an engagement on the aesthetics of experiments and offers an account for analysing how aesthetics features in the design, evaluation and reception of experiments. I identify two dimensions of aesthetic evaluation of experiments: design and significance. When it comes to design, a number of qualities, such as simplicity, economy and aptness, are analysed and illustrated with the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment. Beautiful experiments are also regarded to make significant discoveries, but I argue against a narrow construal of experimental (...) aims. By drawing on the plurality of goals experimenters have and diversity of aesthetic responses, I argue that experiments are aesthetically appreciated both when they discover and when they produce disruptive results. (shrink)