Explanations are the fuel of progress, the fundamental tool through which humans have increased their agency, earning more and more control over their future throughout history. So far, the production of these extraordinary symbolic sequences has been a unique prerogative of human scientists, but the formidable breakthroughs in AI that followed the advent of deep learning evoke the idea of machines capable of assisting us in this endeavour. Not mere tools empowering scientists, but rather peers capable of producing original research and pushing forward knowledge autonomously. In my PhD I am seriously entertaining this idea, and seeking to understand what it means to build an artificial scientist. The highlights of my research in this direction are the paper introducing Explanatory Learning, where we realize that a true artificial scientist can only emerge when a machine can autonomously interpret symbols, and ASIF, where we delve into this interpretation step and model the mechanism through which meaning can be linked to new signs.