Epistemic engagement, aesthetic value and scientific practice

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, involve ‘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 judgment in science, namely, the locus of justification are those processes of attunement, not the aesthetic judgements themselves.