Emotions in scientific practice

Abstract

For a long time, emotions were seen as incompatible with rationality and objectivity of science, and so were a marginal topic in the philosophy of science. This trend has changed progressively since it was determined that objectivity is much linked to social factors while rationality can't do without emotions. As a result, emotions are now slowly finding their way into our understanding of what science is. Here, I make an overview of some aspects of science where emotions and scientific reasoning seem to come into tight contact. For my survey, I will consider such themes as scientific motivation, scientific evaluations, scientific explanations, scientific understanding, scientific imagination, and coherence in science.Using these examples, I discuss the epistemic role of emotions in scientific progress. In conclusion, I advocate for a nuanced view of emotions in science as values that contribute to both epistemic and humanistic dimensions of science.

Scientific experimental articles are modernist stories

“…These shifts are not narratively and epistemically idle, since they capture the gap between the researchers’ actions and nature’s responses. For the reader, it wouldn’t matter that the intentions might be the authors’ retroactive “rationalisations”, since the transition from not knowing to knowing nature’s response to the factual experimental situation is inevitably suspenseful; it also may elicit emotions similar to those elicited by experiments themselves (Kozlov, 2023a , b ; Morgan, 2005 ; Currie, 2018 ). This will be important to remember for discussion (below) on the epistemology of reading experimental reports.…”