Research projects
Aesthetic Values and the Social Dimensions of Science
A , led by Dr Alice Murphy.
Philosophers now widely agree that if we are to understand science, we need to understand its social dimensions. This has given rise to hugely productive studies into the legitimacy of the influence of social values on research, the collective production of scientific knowledge, and the communication of results and methodologies to other scientists and to the public. Discussions on the role of aesthetic values in science have had a resurgence in recent years. Moving beyond the traditional focus of beauty in physics, various aesthetic properties and judgements have been shown to be embedded within many scientific practices, impacting their epistemic goals. Yet these topics have been explored almost entirely independently from the collective aspects of scientific inquiry and knowledge production.
The aim of this project is to develop a novel perspective on aesthetics in science, one which better reflects scientific practice, by centring its social dimensions. In doing so, the project also targets an underlying source of scepticism: the aesthetic is not an anti-social, wholly personal, or subjective sphere; it is intimately connected with the judgements and choices of a scientific community.
Dr Rory Kent joins the Department as a postdoctoral research fellow working on this project in July 2026.
Instruments of Unity: The Many Ways of Being One
Instruments of Unity: the Many Ways of Being One is an , from the with funding of £1.4M. The grant funds a five-year research project from January 2024 through January 2029, employing three postdocs and including a 3.5 year PhD studentship, led by PI Aaron J. Cotnoir.
How do many things come together into single unified entity? What is it to be whole? How is a group united? How do we carve the world into its most natural units? We perceive unities everywhere: from ant colonies to cellular automata, from organisms to organisations. Yet we have little understanding about the general constraints by which they unified. The Instruments of Unity Project tackles this abstract question in a way that provides concrete applicable answers. The core hypothesis: unity is a complex pluralistic phenomenon, requiring a multifaceted theoretical approach. We identify unity relations across a variety of formal settings, using tools from part/whole theory, theories of location, qualitative dimensions, modal logics, graph theory, weighted networks, topology, mathematical morphology, and more. In sum: there are many ways to be one.
Dr Christopher Masterman is a postdoctoral research fellow working on this project.
What if…? Knowing by Imagining (WIKI)
A 2025-2028 , led by Prof. Francesco Berto.
'What if?'-counterfactual questions are of momentous importance for scientific explanations (Would we see that particle track if the atom was ionized?), to ascertain responsibilities (Would he have hit the brakes, had he not been distracted?), to choose what to do (Would I get to the other side if I jumped the stream?). We address them by imagining that a hypothetical situation obtains and wondering what would follow.
But how can imagination give us knowledge of reality, if it's free departure from reality? WIKI will apply in the philosophy of imagination tools from formal epistemology, in particular epistemic and probabilistic logic, to address this issue. If we start by taking counterfactual imagination as a kind of simulated belief revision, we can then analyse it using formal theories of belief revision, in qualitative (focusing on full, all-or-nothing belief) and quantitative clothing (focusing on credences/degrees of belief).
Funded by the , WIKI will develop a logic and a formal epistemology of imagination as suppositional thinking, apply them to analyse the workings of scientific thought experiments, and provide an account of how we can become better hypothetical reasoners.
Dr Soroush Rafiee Rad and Dr Petronella Randell are postdoctoral research fellows working on this project.