Beauty and the Scientific Revolution

Author: (English) James W. McCulloch / Li Wei
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-10-01
Features: In the philosophy of science, the status and role of aesthetic factors and aesthetic standards in the evaluation and selection of theories have always been a challenging and poorly studied issue. This book presents the first comprehensive and systematic research on this topic. For a long time, due to theoretical difficulties, the rationalist tradition in the philosophy of science has excluded the issue of aesthetic standards often invoked by scientists in the evaluation of theories and the emergence of scientific revolutions from rational explanations, significantly weakening the persuasiveness of the rationalist tradition. The goal of this book is to reshape and address the above two difficult problems within the rationalist tradition. The book explores the "inductive construction of aesthetic preferences," proposes the "aesthetic inductive procedure," and, based on this, discusses the relationship between the beauty and truth of scientific theories, the relationship between empirical standards and aesthetic standards, establishes the author's inclination toward aesthetic standards, and concludes by interpreting scientific revolutions as breaks in aesthetic norms. The book also draws on and argues for the above conclusions by examining the process of style formation in applied arts, and validates the effectiveness of the author's conclusions in explaining historical events through analyses and discussions of the Copernican and Keplerian astronomical revolutions and the 20th-century physics revolution. The authors of this book propose a different model of scientific development from Kuhn's and draw conclusions about scientific revolutions that differ from Kuhn's.