JLS: Indeed, beauty plays a role in the polemic between Strawson and Grice on the nature of the material implication or conditional. Strawson (in "If and --->") writes to the effect, "My theory may be less beautiful than Grice but still _truer_." Of course I don't agree! And indeed it _is_ hard to find an example of an 'ugly' scientific theory -- never mind 'true'.
A further turn: Witten says the mathematics of superstring theory is too beautiful not to be true. Yost cannot follow the mathematics that Witten finds beautiful. Therefore superstring theory's truth, for Yost, is not only aesthetic, but vicariously aesthetic, that is, beauty as an appeal to Witten as authority.
Fortunately, again according to authority, the standard model has predictive value and many remaining puzzles.
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