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Beauty, a road to the truth

Synthese 131 (3):291-328 (2002)

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  1. Metaphors in arts and science.Walter Veit & Ney Milan - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-24.
    Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a continuity thesis regarding the function of metaphor across both domains, that is, metaphors fulfill any of the same functions in science as they (...)
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  • Зеркало Клио: Метафизическое Постижение Истории.Алексей Владиславович Халапсис - 2017 - Днипро, Днепропетровская область, Украина, 49000:
    В монографии представлены несколько смысловых блоков, связанных с восприятием и интерпретацией человеком исторического бытия. Ранние греческие мыслители пытались получить доступ к исходникам (началам) бытия, и эти интенции легли в основу научного знания, а также привели к появлению метафизики. В классической (и в неклассической) метафизике за основу была принята догма Пифагора и Платона о неизменности подлинной реальности, из чего следовало отрицание бытийного характера времени. Автор монографии отказывается от этой догмы и предлагает стратегию обновления метафизики и перехода ее к новому — постнеклассическому (...)
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  • Philosophers should prefer simpler theories.Darren Bradley - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (12):3049-3067.
    Should philosophers prefer simpler theories? Huemer (Philos Q 59:216–236, 2009) argues that the reasons to prefer simpler theories in science do not apply in philosophy. I will argue that Huemer is mistaken—the arguments he marshals for preferring simpler theories in science can also be applied in philosophy. Like Huemer, I will focus on the philosophy of mind and the nominalism/Platonism debate. But I want to engage with the broader issue of whether simplicity is relevant to philosophy.
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  • Theism, naturalism, and scientific realism.Jeffrey Koperski - 2017 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 53 (3):152-166.
    Scientific knowledge is not merely a matter of reconciling theories and laws with data and observations. Science presupposes a number of metatheoretic shaping principles in order to judge good methods and theories from bad. Some of these principles are metaphysical (e.g., the uniformity of nature) and some are methodological (e.g., the need for repeatable experiments). While many shaping principles have endured since the scientific revolution, others have changed in response to conceptual pressures both from within science and without. Many of (...)
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  • Aesthetic values in science.Milena Ivanova - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (10):e12433.
    Scientists often use aesthetic values in the evaluation and choice of theories. Aesthetic values are not only regarded as leading to practically more useful theories but are often taken to stand in a special epistemic relation to the truth of a theory such that the aesthetic merit of a theory is evidence of its truth. This paper explores what aesthetic considerations influence scientists' reasoning, how such aesthetic values relate to the utility of a scientific theory, and how one can justify (...)
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  • Explanation and explanationism in science and metaphysics.Juha Saatsi - 2017 - In Matthew H. Slater & Zanja Yudell (eds.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter examines the status of inference to the best explanation in naturalistic metaphysics. The methodology of inference to the best explanation in metaphysics is studied from the perspective of contemporary views on scientific explanation and explanatory inferences in the history and philosophy of science. This reveals serious shortcomings in prevalent attempts to vindicate metaphysical "explanationism" by reference to similarities between science and naturalistic metaphysics. This critique is brought out by considering a common gambit of methodological unity: (1) Both metaphysics (...)
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  • Inference to the best explanation, coherence and other explanatory virtues.Adolfas Mackonis - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):975-995.
    This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation. It draws a clear distinction between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather, coherence should (...)
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  • The beautiful and the sublime in natural science.Peter K. Walhout - 2009 - Zygon 44 (4):757-776.
    The various aesthetic phenomena found repeatedly in the scientific enterprise stem from the role of God as artist. If the Creator is an artist, how and why natural scientists study the divine art work can be understood using theological aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The aesthetic phenomena considered here are as follows. First, science reveals beauty and the sublime in natural phenomena. Second, science discovers beauty and the sublime in the theories that are developed to explain natural phenomena. Third, (...)
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  • Empirical equivalence, explanatory force, and the inference to the best theory.Igor Douven - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):281-309.
    In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.
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  • Aesthetic Criteria in Fundamental Physics—The Viewpoint of Plato.Ivan Melo - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (5):96.
    I discuss the role of beauty in physics. Physicists are sometimes described as platonists for their conviction that the fundamental laws are elegant and aesthetic arguments represent an important epistemic tool. After a review of the ideas of Plato and some of the leading figures of modern physics, which suggest that this is indeed the case, I present a list of current aesthetic criteria. I focus on symmetry and unity and demonstrate their increasing relevance in an array of experimentally verified (...)
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  • Explaining Beauty in Mathematics: An Aesthetic Theory of Mathematics.Ulianov Montano - 2013 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    This book develops a naturalistic aesthetic theory that accounts for aesthetic phenomena in mathematics in the same terms as it accounts for more traditional aesthetic phenomena. Building upon a view advanced by James McAllister, the assertion is that beauty in science does not confine itself to anecdotes or personal idiosyncrasies, but rather that it had played a role in shaping the development of science. Mathematicians often evaluate certain pieces of mathematics using words like beautiful, elegant, or even ugly. Such evaluations (...)
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  • (1 other version)Empirical progress and nomic truth approximation revisited.Theo Kuipers - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46:64-72.
    In my From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism I have shown how an instrumentalist account of empirical progress can be related to nomic truth approximation. However, it was assumed that a strong notion of nomic theories was needed for that analysis. In this paper it is shown, in terms of truth and falsity content, that the analysis already applies when, in line with scientific common sense, nomic theories are merely assumed to exclude certain conceptual possibilities as nomic possibilities.
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  • Colloquium 3: Why Beauty is Truth in All We Know: Aesthetics and Mimesis in Neoplatonic Science1.Marije Martijn - 2010 - Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 25 (1):69-108.
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  • Aesthetic induction versus coherence: Reply to Paul Thagard.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 84 (1):371-374.
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  • Recent work on aesthetics of science.James W. McAllister - 2002 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16 (1):7 – 11.
    This introduction to the special issue on "Aesthetics of Science" reviews recent philosophical research on aesthetic aspects of science. Topics represented in this research include the aesthetic properties of scientific images, theories, and experiments; the relation of science and art; the role of aesthetic criteria in scientific practice and their effect on the development of science; aesthetic aspects of mathematics; the contrast between a classic and a Romantic aesthetic; and the relation between emotion, cognition, and rationality.
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  • Hume on Theoretical Simplicity.Hsueh Qu - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1).
    Hume often praises and appeals to the theoretical virtue of simplicity in his philosophy. Yet there has been relatively little scholarship done on Hume’s conception of theoretical simplicity. This paper will look to rectify this lacuna in the literature. In particular, it will look to answer three questions as they relate to Hume’s philosophy. First, what is theoretical simplicity? Second, why should we favour simpler theories over more complex ones? Third, can a theory be too simple, and if so, how?The (...)
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  • Beauty in science: a new model of the role of aesthetic evaluations in science. [REVIEW]Ulianov Montano - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2):133-156.
    In Beauty and Revolution in Science, James McAllister advances a rationalistic picture of science in which scientific progress is explained in terms of aesthetic evaluations of scientific theories. Here I present a new model of aesthetic evaluations by revising McAllister’s core idea of the aesthetic induction. I point out that the aesthetic induction suffers from anomalies and theoretical inconsistencies and propose a model free from such problems. The new model is based, on the one hand, on McAllister’s original model and (...)
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  • Why is beauty a road to the truth?Paul Thagard - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 84 (1):365-370.
    This paper discusses Theo Kuipers' account of beauty and truth. It challenges Kuipers' psychological account of how scientists come to appreciate beautiful theories, as well as his attempt to justify the use of aesthetic criteria on the basis of a "meta-induction." I propose an alternative psychological/philosophical account based on emotional coherence.
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  • Epistemic Engagement, Aesthetic Value, and Scientific Practice.Adrian Currie - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (2):313-334.
    I develop an account of the relationship between aesthetics and knowledge, focusing on scientific practice. Cognitivists infer from ‘partial sensitivity’—aesthetic appreciation partly depends on doxastic states—to ‘factivity’, the idea that the truth or otherwise of those beliefs makes a difference to aesthetic appreciation. Rejecting factivity, I develop a notion of ‘epistemic engagement’: partaking genuinely in a knowledge-directed process of coming to epistemic judgements, and suggest that this better accommodates the relationship between the aesthetic and the epistemic. Scientific training (and other (...)
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  • (1 other version)Empirical progress and nomic truth approximation revisited.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46:64-72.
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  • Beauty in mathematics.Ulianov Montano Juarez - unknown
    The aim of this work is to account for expressions like “Cantor’s diagonal proof is elegant” or “Euler identity is the most beautiful formula of mathematics”. This type of expressions is common among mathematicians; however, they may result in two kinds of puzzled reactions: first, the non mathematician may find the use of the word ‘beautiful’ strange in this context. Second, the mathematician may try to reinterpret mathematical beauty in terms of the principles and precepts of mathematics itself. I present (...)
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  • Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation.Valeraino Iranzo - unknown
    Bayesianism and Inference to the best explanation are two different models of inference. Recently there has been some debate about the possibility of “bayesianizing” IBE. Firstly I explore several alternatives to include explanatory considerations in Bayes’s Theorem. Then I distinguish two different interpretations of prior probabilities: “IBE-Bayesianism” and “frequentist-Bayesianism”. After detailing the content of the latter, I propose a rule for assessing the priors. I also argue that Freq-Bay: endorses a role for explanatory value in the assessment of scientific hypotheses; (...)
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  • Pythagorean heuristic in physics.Sorin Bangu - 2006 - Perspectives on Science 14 (4):387-416.
    : Some of the great physicists' belief in the existence of a connection between the aesthetical features of a theory (such as beauty and simplicity) and its truth is still one of the most intriguing issues in the aesthetics of science. In this paper I explore the philosophical credibility of a version of this thesis, focusing on the connection between the mathematical beauty and simplicity of a theory and its truth. I discuss a heuristic interpretation of this thesis, attempting to (...)
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  • What is the best empirically equivalent theory?: Reply to Igor Douven.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):310-313.
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  • Problem reduction and its relevance: Reply to Thomas Nickles.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 84 (1):134-137.
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