Freddy Purcell –
A few weeks ago, those of us taking the new Philosophical Research module led by Kirsten Walsh had the opportunity to personally engage with Adrian Currie and his interlocutor, Derek Turner, on the relationship between epistemic and aesthetic experience within scientific pursuit. In his 2019 book, ‘Paleoaesthetics and the Practice of Paleontology’, Derek argues for historical cognitivism, the broad idea that with all things being equal in an agent’s position in relation to an object, they will make better aesthetic judgements if they are informed by true knowledge. While they agree on many claims within this area of philosophy, it is this claim that Adrian resists in his 2023 paper, ‘Epistemic Engagement, Aesthetic Value, and Scientific Practice’.
Once we heard Adrian’s side of this debate, we video called Derek from his office at Connecticut College to pose our questions and challenges, all of which he answered carefully and fully. Overall, it was a great opportunity to engage in an ongoing philosophical debate and gain some insight into how the academic world works. For anyone interested in the relationship between epistemology and aesthetics, particularly within scientific practice, I would strongly recommend the works I mentioned above. However, this interview will deal primarily with another topic raised in our call with Derek. The relationship between knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the natural world.
This interview was conducted by email correspondence, for which I am extremely grateful to Derek for his kind responses and detailed answers to my questions. I hope you enjoy the interview!
What are your current main areas of academic interest?
I’m really interested in understanding the aesthetic dimensions of natural science, especially the historical sciences and environmental sciences. Lately I’ve been focusing on the concept of provenance, which has its home in archaeology and art history. I’m interested in exploring what it might mean to care about the provenance of species, geological formations, places, and of course fossils. The idea is that one way of understanding how science might have an aesthetic dimension is to think of science as investigating provenance.
What first got you interested in these topics?
For many years, I had this feeling that my intellectual life was on two parallel tracks. I was mostly working on issues in the philosophy of historical science. But much of my teaching at Connecticut College is in environmental studies, and I’ve pursued some research interests in environmental philosophy along the way (on topics such as the precautionary principle, NIMBY activism, and even, in a former life, the ethics of sabotage as a tactic of environmental activism). But I had trouble figuring out how to integrate my work in philosophy of science with my environmental interests. Around 2016 or 2017, I started to realize that a number of philosophers working in environmental aesthetics had been saying things that seemed relevant to understanding science. Discovering Allen Carlson’s work on “scientific cognitivism” in environmental aesthetics had a big impact on my thinking. He was drawing a tight connection between scientific knowledge and aesthetic appreciation, and it struck me that his view would also have implications for philosophy of science.
When I first encountered Caitlin Wylie’s work on the practice of fossil preparation, that was also an “aha” moment for me. When I first saw her speak about fossil preparators’ self-conception as engaging in a creative activity where aesthetic values have a role, I wondered: What if something like that is true of historical science more generally?
My spouse, Michelle Turner, is an archaeologist, and in the summer of 2016, she did fieldwork in New Mexico for her PhD. I got to spend the summer hanging out with archaeologists in the field, and that was also eye-opening. There is so much more I could say about this, but one thing that became obvious to me is that the fieldwork was all about cultivating sense of place.
What do you believe the connection between true knowledge and quality of aesthetic engagement is?
As a first pass, I think that learning stuff about where things come from better positions us to engage with those things, aesthetically. In this connection, I think it’s really interesting to look at the history of science and attend to how geologists (for example) wrote about their work. Here is a favourite quotation of mine, from the Massachusetts geologist Edward Hitchcock, writing in 1863:
I reckon, and who does not reckon, among the purest pleasures of life, the opportunity to gaze upon the beautiful, the bizarre, and the sublime in natural scenery. Such occasions form delightful oases among life’s barren sands. We never forget them. They have few or no drawbacks, and we enjoy them by retrospection over and over again, and with increasing relish. But though such scenes lie not exclusively within the province of the geologist, he is prepared better than others to enjoy them.[1]
Why would Hitchcock say that the geologist is better prepared than others to enjoy “the beautiful, the bizarre, and the sublime” in nature? The most straightforward answer here is that the geologist knows something about the deeper histories of these landscapes. I kind of see my project as an effort to start with this idea of Hitchcock’s and run with it, philosophically.
In what way do you think knowledge of the provenance of an object, such as a piece of art, impacts our aesthetic appreciation of that object? How about our judgement?
Some of the most interesting examples of this involve learning something negative about something’s provenance. The film, The Red Violin, traces the history of the last violin ever made by a fictional Italian artisan. The violin has a strange red varnish. We see it pass from player to player over centuries, with different artists using it to make stunningly beautiful music. The film is basically a biopic, with the violin as the main character. Then at the end of the film, we learn something macabre about the origin of the red varnish. That reveal makes you rethink your aesthetic experience of the music. The music is still beautiful, but it’s not the same. In this case, the instrument itself is an object of aesthetic appreciation, too. Learning about the instrument’s tragic origins completely changes how you perceive it and how you appreciate it. It changes the meaning of the music that it produces.
Do you think historical knowledge of a natural object impacts our aesthetic appreciation and judgement of it in the same way it does with art?
Yes, definitely. I think one way to see this clearly is to focus on cases where human artists are almost collaborating with what we might call natural processes. One of my favourite films is Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which takes us into Chauvet cave, in France. The cave itself is an otherworldly geological space. Around 30,000 years ago, human artists working by firelight used the contours of the cave’s walls to create images of animals that seem to be in motion. Simply knowing that the artwork is tens of thousands of years old helps us appreciate it better. But understanding the geological processes that form caves is just as important, because the cave itself is part of the artwork; it’s both a natural formation and a cultural landscape, at the same time.
I recently went for a hike in a spot in Rhode Island, not too far from where I live. The hike goes along the top of the Orient Point-Fishers Island-Charlestown recessional moraine. It’s a ridge that was formed around 21,000 years ago, as the late Wisconsinian glacier was receding at the end of the last ice age. You can see it on a map if you draw a line along the north shore of Long Island and continue across the water to Rhode Island. You experience the landscape differently when you know how it was formed. You can stand on top of the moraine and look out to see, knowing that not so long ago, you would have been standing below a wall of ice, and because sea levels were lower, you would have been looking out over dry land. In my 2019 book I call this “stereotemporal experience.” The basic idea is that knowing something’s history changes your experience of it.
Do you think our aesthetic engagement is less deeply impacted by historical information when encountering natural things? If so, could this be because there isn’t a strong institutional sense, like there is with art, in which we are told to value the provenance of natural things?
This depends a little bit on the case. I think a lot about natural history museums in this connection, which is one sort of institution that does emphasize the provenance of “natural” things. I put “natural” in scare quotes there because one insight from Caitlin Wylie’s work is that the fossils we see on exhibit in museums are typically artistic creations that owe a lot to the skill and creativity of preparators and exhibit designers. I do think there are some institutional contexts where part of the provenance of things like fossils, or meteorites, or gemstones, gets foregrounded. I say “part of” because as Wylie has shown, the work of fossil preparators, which is part of the fossils’ provenance as well, often gets backgrounded.
It’s also true, though, that there’s often less emphasis on provenance when it comes to experiencing local plants, animals, and landscapes. One of my goals in defending aesthetic cognitivism is to show why having some scientific knowledge of the world around us – the sort of knowledge that you get from the environmental sciences, especially – is really crucial for cultivating richer experience with the environment.
If our social context at least partially determines the impact of knowledge on aesthetic engagement, does this relativise the connection between these two things? Does this also relativise the impact truth has on aesthetic judgement?
Aesthetic engagement is a norm-governed activity. This is obvious when you think of something as simple as the norms governing when the audience is supposed to clap during a musical or theatrical performance. Even something like the “leave no trace” principles for outdoor recreation – principles which are usually treated as ethical norms – are historically contingent norms that heavily shape the aesthetic experience of, say, backpacking. In some ways, these norms of aesthetic culture are kind of fluid and subject to revision and change. Maybe one way to think about my view is that our current aesthetic culture happens to think that knowledge of provenance is important. It’s not too hard to imagine some alternative aesthetic cultures that don’t value such knowledge at all. But I think those would be very, very different. We could imagine art museums that conceal information about who created the artworks and when.
But I think I’d want to go further than saying that our aesthetic culture is one that just happens to treat knowledge of provenance (or broadly speaking, knowledge of an artwork’s history) as important. These are not arguments that I’ve worked out very well, but I’m tempted to say that some sort of interest in provenance might be essential to having any aesthetic culture at all. One reason for that is that artists, like philosophers, are always in conversation with what has come before, and that conversational history is always part of what an artwork is.
In something like a natural history museum, natural objects are placed in a setting for aesthetic appreciation in a similar way to objects of art. Could emphasis on this practice encourage us to think more about the provenance of natural features? Could this lead to a negative objectification of nature?
I’m partial to natural history museums that are situated in the very landscapes where the fossils come from. The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, is one example. Here in Connecticut, we have a special site called Dinosaur State Park, where they built a museum around dinosaur trackways that you can see in situ. On my most recent visit to the UK, Adrian Currie generously arranged a visit to see the Etches Collection on the Jurassic Coast, and that is another wonderful example. These sorts of museums definitely encourage people to learn about the deeper historical provenance of the very ground that you are walking on when you step outside the museum. So, the museums contribute in really interesting ways to the cultivation of sense of place.
I do also think a lot about the commodification of fossils. Just as an artwork’s market value depends heavily on its provenance, the history of a fossil has a lot to do with its market value. Here I mean not only the deep time history of the fossil, but also its more recent provenance – who collected, and under what circumstances? Was the collector operating legally? Etc. Some of the same auction houses that sell artworks also sell fossils. In general, I think commodification of fossils (hence, of scientific evidence) is a topic that is under-explored by philosophers, and this might be an example of “negative objectification.”
You mentioned that natural objects have an aesthetic value, what sort of value would this be?
This is a really tough question. It is really easy to settle into talking about “aesthetic value” without ever getting clear what that means. I don’t have a terribly good theory about this, (not sure anyone does.), but I’d say a few things. First, aesthetic value is a broader category than just “beauty.” Second, whatever it is, aesthetic value has positive normative valence. I am actually pretty tempted here to take a particularist view and just give an example. I once saw a spotted salamander in my driveway. It wasn’t exactly beautiful. Or at least, the term ‘beauty’ feels too thin and watered down to describe it. It was around six inches long, with insanely bright yellow spots running down its back. It was a rainy evening in March, and the little animal was glistening in the rain. I cherish that experience, but I also find it hard to say why spotted salamanders are so unbelievably cool without talking some about their biology, about how there is only one night per year when you can even see them, because they are migrating from their hiding places to find the nearest vernal pool. I’m tempted to treat this as a sort of paradigm case of something that has real aesthetic value. It was just an amazing, unreal animal to see and experience. Here is a photo that I took:
I think the best way to approach the question, “what sort of value would this be?” is to start with examples like this. There is something very special about these perceptual encounters.
Do different natural things have greater or lesser aesthetic value than each other? Could and should this inform choices in conservation?
On this issue I am really influenced by the work of Emily Brady, who has argued (contra people like Allen Carlson who defend “positive aesthetics”) that there are some genuinely ugly and gross things in nature. For example, once I had the experience of smelling a hyena in the wild (in Addo Elephant Park in South Africa), and it was one of the most revolting things I’ve ever smelled. I just can’t think of any way to spin that smell as beautiful. So, I suspect that Brady might be right about this. Interestingly, though, she also holds that ugly things are worth engaging with and sometimes worth protecting. And although the hyena smelled awful, it was also in its own way an arrestingly dynamic animal – much faster and more graceful than I ever would have imagined. This suggests that the connection between “X has aesthetic value” and “we should work to protect or conserve X” is a little complicated. In lots of cases, the fascinating aesthetic complexity is what’s worth protecting.
What role does narrative play in our aesthetic engagement and judgement? Is it possible, in some cases, that narrative has a greater role in improving our aesthetic judgement than truth does? The case I always think about is a Pre-Socratic idea that stars are holes in the atmosphere through which we can see the ring of fire that surrounds the universe. It’s false, I think, but I feel like it has deeply enhanced my appreciation of the night sky.
To start with, when we trace something’s provenance, we are basically constructing a narrative. This gives narrative one sort of aesthetic importance, assuming (in the spirit of historical cognitivism) that knowledge of provenance better positions us to engage aesthetically with things. But narratives themselves are also epistemic/aesthetic hybrid structures. Narratives have familiar cognitive functions – for example, they constitute historical scientific explanations. There is a rich tradition in philosophy of science that tries to account for just how narratives explain. But narratives are aesthetic objects in their own right, and we bring aesthetic norms to bear in assessing them. A narrative is always also, at some level, a literary construction. The construction and assessment of narrative explanations is another aspect of the practice of historical science that I think is saturated with aesthetic considerations. Ahmed AboHamad and I have a recent paper in the Journal for the Philosophy of History where we argue that you can’t even construct a narrative explanation without invoking non-epistemic values.
I love the example from the Pre-Socratics. In general, it’s a really interesting question whether narratives that we know aren’t correct might still enhance aesthetic engagement in some way. One quick caveat: I’m not entirely sure if I’d say that the Pre-Socratic theory is really a historical narrative. The case you describe strikes me as a case of “seeing as” – i.e. as a case where it’s rewarding to see the stars in a certain way that we know isn’t accurate. I haven’t thought enough about this, but I’m tempted to say that this distinctive sort of “seeing as” experience is happening against the backdrop of our knowing what the stars are. So that might matter to the character of the experience. And I think that acknowledging the richness of the experience you are describing might be compatible with saying that we’re better off, aesthetically, knowing what the stars are.
There is a romantic era idea that epistemic pursuit of something can be disenchanting. Your work seems to emphasise the importance of aesthetics as part of epistemic pursuits. Is it possible that greater attendance to the aesthetic can re-enchant those working towards knowledge?
I really appreciate this question. There is a tradition in nineteenth century romanticism that sees natural science as basically disenchanting. Wordsworth wrote that “we murder to dissect.” Walt Whitman writes that he “became tired and sick” when he “heard the learned astronomer” lecturing, but he recovered by ignoring the science and going outside to “look up in perfect silence at the stars.” I’m not really on board with this strain of romanticism. But there are other strains of romanticism that see scientific investigation as “re-enchanting,” as you put it in your question. Learning stuff deepens our connections to the systems we are studying. As a contrast to Wordsworth and Whitman, I’d recommend Emily Dickinson, who knew a lot about geology, and who wrote some fascinating geological poetry. She has one poem that I love called “Vesuvius at Home.” She writes: “A lava step at any time/ am I inclined to climb.” This is all about local sense of place (though not only about that) because she was probably talking about the Mt. Holyoke range, which was just south of her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She knew – probably from attending lectures by Edward Hitchcock – that the hills to the south were volcanic basalt.
Do you think that epistemic inquiry can be an expression of care for the epistemic subject? For example, an environmental scientist’s field work.
Yes – Absolutely! This is really what I want to convey. Connecticut College, where I work, has a rich tradition of research on coastal salt marsh ecosystems. The project of studying and monitoring those ecosystems, understanding how they work and how they came to be, is just a way of caring about them. For me, this is all about sense of place. Field research is all about learning about a place and its history. That deepens aesthetic engagement with the place. At the same time, field research just is a form of aesthetic engagement. Field research has epistemic goals, for sure – there is data to collect in the service of answering research questions. But the goal of cultivating sense of place is also front and centre, and the epistemic practices may also subserve that goal. And all of this is a way of caring about places, and developing a shared history with those places.
I am really honoured to be serving, for the time being, as director of Connecticut College’s Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment. One of the people the Centre is named for, Bill Niering, was a botanist at the college and a legendary expert in coastal salt marsh ecology. Niering was an activist too, and he testified before the state legislature in Hartford to try to convince elected officials to pass the first state laws to protect coastal wetlands. For Niering, studying the salt marshes and getting to know them was a way of caring about them, and this care translated into political activism as well.
Here is a picture of the coastal salt marsh system at Barn Island, Connecticut:
As an aside, I was wondering what you think about how myths might guide our epistemic engagement with something. It seems to me that at different stages of a myth’s existence it might be believed to be true (like in the days of Hesiod’s Theogony) or false, or even something in between where we mostly think myths are false, but there is part of us that wonders if they’re true (what if the Loch Ness Monster was real?). No matter what beliefs you have about the truth of a myth, it seems like they can be used to improve our aesthetic engagement with something. For example, being told a rock face is a dragon that died and turned to stone might make us see certain features as a mouth, wings, tail etc. I don’t know how epistemically worthwhile that sort of narrative is necessarily, but is this a case where something improves our epistemic judgement, regardless of its truth?
This is such an interesting point. You are really getting at something important here that any account would need to accommodate. Local legends and folklore often contribute to sense of place, even when we know that the stories are probably false.
This links up with the earlier point about “seeing as.” In Europe, before people had really sorted out the origins of fossils, there was a tradition of supposing that coiled shell ammonoid fossils were in fact petrified snakes (i.e. “snakestones.”). In some cases, people would even carve snake heads onto the fossils. We know this to be mistaken, but one thing I’d say about this is that this history of misinterpretation is now part of the provenance of those fossils. Knowing that this is what people have made of these things in the past can and should also affect our engagement with those things in the present. This might be one indirect way in which older ideas and narratives can enhance our aesthetic engagement with something, regardless of their truth. Our engagement with ammonoid fossils is enhanced by knowing what people have made of them in the past.
Editor’s note: Since engaging with Derek, Adrian Currie pointed out that some Maori songs have the exact purpose that I was driving at with the above point. These songs discuss a mythical formation of the landscape, but are used for the purpose of navigation. Here it seems to be that the aesthetic and epistemic are completely blended and used as a tool. I am sure this is a case of the idea of “seeing as” that Derek describes, but there is a clear epistemic purpose to the songs that goes beyond deepening engagement with the landscape. If anyone knows anything about how these songs function (or any other examples), particularly if they drive Maori people to navigate in specific ways, I’d be fascinated to learn more!
[1] Hitchcock, E. 1863. Reminiscences of Amherst college: Historical, scientific, biographical, and auto- biographical. Northampton, MA: Bridgman & Childs, pp. 402-403.