AESTHETIC INDUCTION VERSUS COHERENCE

Paul Thagard’s brief contribution deserves a long reply, but I confine myself here to some basic issues. I start with some concessions relative to SiS regarding simplicity and analogy, followed by rebutting Thagard’s general and specific reserves about my recent naturalistic-cum-formal inductive account of the relation between beauty and truth. Finally, I raise some doubts about the exhaustiveness of his coherence account of that relation and its supposed incompatibility with my account. Aesthetic Induction, Empirical Success, and Truth Approximation Let me start by reporting some new considerations that are relevant to Thagard’s contribution. In SiS I went as far as to claim that simplicity should only play a role in case of equal success (SiS, p. 238, and Section 11.2) and for analogy I saw no role at all (SiS, p. 297). Contrary to my previous beliefs, at the time of completion of SiS, very much stimulated by reading McAllister (1996), I was beginning to understand that there might be a relation between truth and simplicity, and, more recently, stimulated by a discussion wit