Epistemic Engagement, Aesthetic Value, and Scientific Practice
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: 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 knowledge-directed activities), I argue, involves ‘attunement’: the co-option of aesthetic judgements towards epistemic ends. Thus, the connection between aesthetic appreciation and knowledge is psychological and contingent. This view has consequences for the warrant of aesthetic judgement in science, namely, the locus of justification is those processes of attunement, not the aesthetic judgements themselves.
DOI: 10.1086/714802
Author: Adrian Currie
Institution: University of Exeter
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3083020001