‘What has beauty to with science? Quite a lot, judging by what scientists say and do. It is quite common, for instance, to invoke judgements of beauty, aptness, and harmony when evaluating theories, cleaning data, or making field sketches, to favour simple models, and to be guided by a sense of elegance when solving problems. Through examples, primarily taken from the earth sciences, I show that aesthetics plays a role not just in theorising but also in scientific practice. I argue that this aesthetic aspect of knowledge acquisition can be explained as a special case of affective cognition, and that we can explain broadly aesthetic feelings and judgements in scientific and other epistemic contexts as upshots of metacognitive processes which monitors the quality and likely success of our cognitive engagement with theory and evidence. This allows aesthetic feelings to be rough-and-ready signals of epistemic value and thus explain how they can play a positive role in science. I use the natural sciences as a test case, but if what I argue is on the right track, then this is a common feature of human cognition and so generalises to other epistemic contexts.’

‘Dr Miyata-Sturm is a Stipendiary Lecturer at New College and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Oxford, and will be a Postdoctoral Fellow on the ERC-funded project Know-How at the University of Glasgow from July 2026. She works on the aesthetics of science, with a special focus on plate tectonics, and is the author of “Aesthetic Considerations in the Development of Plate Tectonics” (2024), published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and “Aesthetic Feelings in Scientific Reasoning” (2024).’