The Leo Apostel Center

in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme of the VUB invites
everyone to the 37th of its interdisciplinary seminars in the
Foundations series. In this series CLEA invites scholars that are
actively engaged in the research on the foundations of a particular
discipline. Their lectures will always be directed to an
interdisciplinary audience, and the discussions aim at confronting
the foundations of the different disciplines.


       IS BEAUTY A SIGN OF TRUTH IN SCIENTIFIC THEORIES?
       ************************************************


             by Prof. Dr. James W. McAllister


        Faculty of Philosophy, University of Leiden,
                     The Netherlands



Wednesday, June 9, 1999 at 5 p.m. in room 5/C401(building C, 5th
floor), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus Oefenplein

About the lecture

P. A. M. Dirac explained why he embraced relativity theory by saying,
"It is the essential beauty of the theory which I feel is the real
reason for believing in it." But is the beauty of scientific theories
a reliable indicator of their proximity to the truth? I shall argue
that scientists' aesthetic preferences are formulated and updated by
an inductive mechanism: the greater empirical success a theory
demonstrates, the greater value is attached to its aesthetic
properties in a scientific community's aesthetic canon. Scientists
are thereby motivated to formulate further theories that show these
same aesthetic properties.
This inductive process can be expected to unearth any correlation
that may exist between theories' possessing certain aesthetic
properties and their being close to the truth. Thus, whether beauty
in theories is a reliable indicator of proximity to the truth depends
ultimately on empirical facts about the world: I shall argue that the
evidence so far is negative. I shall conclude with some remarks about
the conservative role of aesthetic preferences in scientific
revolutions.


About the speaker

Dr. James W. McAllister (MA, Cambridge & Toronto; PhD, Cambridge) has
been university lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of
Leiden, since 1990. He was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, in 1997. He is the author of Beauty and Revolution
in Science (Cornell University Press, 1996), and co-editor of The
Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge University
Press, 1995). In recent years his main research interest has been the
role of aesthetic factors in theory choice in science. His current
research concerns the relation between the structure of the world and
patterns in data sets, and the ways in which laws of nature represent
the world.


The presentation with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards,
an hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the
topic.
More info at the CLEA office: phone 02-644 26 77 or via the Web-page:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/