The Philosophy of Curiosity

Ilhan Inan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136471391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In this book, Ilhan Inan questions the classical definition of curiosity as a desire to know. Working in an area where epistemology and philosophy of language overlap, Inan forges a link between our ability to become aware of our ignorance and our linguistic aptitude to construct terms referring to things unknown.

The book introduces the notion of inostensible reference (or reference to the unknown). Ilhan connects this notion to related concepts in philosophy of language: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; the referential and the attributive uses of definite descriptions; the de re/de dicto distinction; and Kripke's distinction between rigid and accidental designators.

Continuing with a discussion of the conditions for curiosity and its satisfaction, Inan argues that the learning process—starting in curiosity and ending in knowledge—is always an effort to transform our inostensible terms into ostensible ones. A contextual account is adopted for the satisfaction of curiosity. It then discusses the conditions of successful reference to the object of curiosity and its presuppositions. The book concludes with a discussion on the limits of curiosity and its satisfaction.

1 Meno’s Paradox and Inostensible Conceptualization

As we have seen in the previous chapter the philosophy literature has little to offer on even the most basic philosophical issues related to curiosity. Not only has there been very little discussion, but some of the basic philosophical questions on the topic have never been posed explicitly to motivate the discussion in the first place. Oddly enough one of the central philosophical questions on curiosity is buried in a famous passage in a text that is more than two millennia old. This short intriguing passage is in Plato’s Meno and has gone down in history as “Meno’s Paradox”. It implicitly addresses what I take to be one of the most fundamental questions on curiosity: What are the necessary conditions for a being to become curious? Giving an account of this will enable us to understand the nature of curiosity better, and, most importantly, it will reveal how curiosity requires a certain way in which we use language. It will also shed light on other issues, such as why some beings are curious and others are not, why some are more curious than others, and why some can develop curiosity in matters that others have never thought about and perhaps even could not think about without extending their language. Exploratory behavior and novelty seeking or sensation seeking behavior are possible symptoms of curiosity, if curiosity is taken to be a mental state. So the question just posed is not merely a question of how it becomes possible for a being to exhibit such behavior. Non-human animals and pre-language children too exhibit such behavior at times, but that alone is not sufficient to attribute to them a mental state of curiosity that finds its expression in language in the form of a question. A normal adult who speaks a language, no matter how uneducated he or she is, has the ability to become aware of his or her ignorance, be curious of it, and express this in the form of an interrogative sentence and pose a question. How is this possible? This is the way in which the issue before us ought to be interpreted, and it is the question that I will concentrate on in this chapter in relation to the so-called Meno’s Paradox. Before we get into a discussion of it, I should note that I take the question not to be a purely philosophical one. No doubt there are certain empirical conditions for a member of a species to become curious; cognitive and evolutionary psychology, neuro-science, cognitive science, and biology could and should attempt to reveal those conditions. Such issues go beyond the scope of my work and by far exceed my scientific knowledge of the matter to say anything useful. Rather my discussion will be limited to a philosophical interpretation of the question. I take it as a given that a normal adult human who speaks a language has the ability to become curious, which he or she could express in language. The issue I wish to raise is this: What kind of mental, conceptual, and linguistic abilities allow us to be curious? Plato’s Meno implicitly addresses exactly this issue, although in a roundabout way; so it is a natural, intuitive, and stimulating way to start the discussion. The discussion to follow of the so-called Meno’s Paradox will allow us to introduce the notion of inostensible reference, which will be pivotal in dealing with the issue at hand, namely, how it is possible to be curious. This chapter will only lay down the preliminaries for a more complete account of inostensible reference, which will be discussed in length through Chapters 3 and 9.

In Plato’s Meno, after being refuted by Socrates on all his attempts to give an account of what virtue is, a fed-up Meno uses his last resources to challenge Socrates by showing that what he is asking for, namely, inquiring into something unknown, is in fact impossible:

Meno: And how will you inquire, Socrates, into something when you don’t know at all what it is? Which of the things that you don’t know will you propose as the object of your inquiry? Or even if you really stumble upon it, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you didn’t know? (Meno, 80d5–8)

In response, Socrates puts the riddle in a dilemma form:

Socrates: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what an eristic argument you are introducing—that it is impossible for someone to inquire into what he knows or does not know; he wouldn’t inquire into what he knows, since he already knows it and there is no need for such a person to inquire; nor into what he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t know what he is going to inquire into. (Meno, 80e2–6)

Despite the fact that the notion of curiosity does not even appear in this intriguing little puzzle, it indirectly raises the very question in hand. Although the puzzle is commonly referred to by Plato scholars as “Meno’s Paradox”, it is quite doubtful that anyone thinks that there is a genuine paradox here. In fact the puzzle has attracted the attention only of Plato scholars and, to my knowledge, has never been discussed as a philosophical problem. I too don’t believe that the so-called Meno’s Paradox is a paradox, but it should be evident by now that I do take it to be addressing a genuine philosophical problem, in fact, two separate but interrelated problems about inquiry and discovery. There are two arguments that Meno puts forth, both of which appear to have obviously false conclusions: The first concludes that inquiry is impossible, and the second concludes that even if inquiry were to be possible, discovery of the object of inquiry is impossible. But we know very well that they are both possible and are in fact actual, and hence the puzzle. As we shall see now, there is no consensus in the Plato scholarship as to how to resolve the puzzle, but this debate is not ultimately my concern. The reason for this is that Plato scholars who have written on the topic were not interested in the problem of how inquiry and discovery are possible as a general philosophical problem. Rather their main attention has been directed at where the puzzle stands within Plato’s philosophy; did Plato really think there was a genuine problem here? If not, why did he discuss it? If he did think otherwise, did he have a clear solution to it himself? Such are the nature of the questions that Plato scholars have dealt with. Secondly, their discussion has been targeted at philosophical inquiries in specific, given that this is the context in which Plato raises it. It may perhaps be the case that the solutions they have offered could be taken to be satisfactory, although I have my doubts about this, as long as we limit the problem within the boundaries of the kind of inquiry that Plato is engaged in Meno and elsewhere. Some of these proposals may, for instance, provide good explanations as to what makes it possible for us to inquire into virtue, knowledge, and so on. But I wish to discuss the issue in a lot more general way. Whatever the object of an inquiry is, whether it is a Platonic form or an empirical issue, I wish to concentrate on the problem of what makes it possible for us to start an inquiry and to finish it. So when I criticize these proposals put forth by Plato scholars, I may not be doing full justice to them, given that they have not intended them to be solutions for the general problem that I wish to discuss. With this proviso I shall argue that the most common solutions offered to it are all unsatisfactory, even if each one has some element of truth in it. This should also be a good indicator that there is a genuine philosophical problem addressed by Meno’s Paradox; after all both inquiry and discovery are notions that have great philosophical significance for epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as other related areas, such as philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. So if there is no clear cut solution to the puzzle to the satisfaction of everyone, then we should conclude that there really is an interesting philosophical problem here. This becomes more evident once we apply Meno’s puzzle to the notion of curiosity. Here is how we could modify Meno’s reasoning, and Socrates’ rendering of it, so that it applies to curiosity:

Meno: And how can you be curious, Socrates, about something when you don’t know at all what it is? Which of the things that you don’t know will you propose as the object of your curiosity? Or even if you really stumble upon it, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you were curious about?

And Socrates’ response would read as:

Socrates: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what an eristic argument you are introducing—that it is impossible for someone to be curious about what he knows or does not know; he wouldn’t be curious about what he knows, since he already knows it, there is no need for such a person to be curious; nor about what he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t know what he is curious about.

Now I do not mean to suggest that the original version and modified one addressing curiosity are exactly on a par in terms of the problems they raise and the solutions they call for. Inquiry is one thing, curiosity is another; discovery is one thing, satisfaction of curiosity is another. After all not every inquiry starts off with curiosity, and not all instances of curiosity lead to inquiry. Someone may inquire into something, not because he is curious, but because his job requires him to do so, or he wishes to get some satisfaction by it, or to find something novel, or to gain power, and so on. So a solution to the problem of how inquiry is possible cannot give a full account of how curiosity is possible, and vice versa. Nonetheless, the two versions have one common element with respect to the solutions they call for, namely, they both require the subject to conceptualize what he does not know. Or I shall argue. So in what follows what I wish to do is to take up the standard solutions offered by Plato scholars to the original puzzle and show how they are insufficient, not only in explaining how it is possible to inquire into something, but also how it is possible to be curious . As we shall see, the conclusions I reach, concerning what goes wrong in the standard solutions offered to the puzzle, and the alternative solution I will offer will be equally applicable to the revised version of the puzzle, which concludes that curiosity and its satisfaction are impossible. From this discussion will emerge the notions of inostenible conceptualization and inostensible reference (roughly corresponding to conceptualization and reference to something unknown, respectively), which will be central to all the discussions to follow in the forthcoming chapters.

As noted by various Plato scholars, Socrates’ version of the problem concentrates on the first part of Meno’s argument concerning the impossibility of inquiry and ignores the latter part concerning the impossibility of coming to know what one is inquiring into.¹ Following Dominic Scott, let us refer to the former as the “The Paradox of Inquiry” and the latter as “the Paradox of Discovery”.² I shall use his terminology in the forthcoming discussion. However, I will not make an issue of why Socrates ignored the latter problem and what significance this may or may not have concerning our interpretation of Plato’s work; rather my discussion will merely concentrate on the philosophical problems related to Scott’s important distinction. So in what follows I will use the term “the Paradox” or “Meno’s Paradox” to refer to both of these problems, and when I have to discuss them separately I will use Scott’s terminology.

Various authors who have written on the topic have suggested that in order to inquire into something and then later come to know it, one cannot be in total darkness as to what he is inquiring into. One needs a certain “specification” of the thing that is being sought, that allows him to start the inquiry, and to be able to recognize the object of inquiry on coming across it. However, there is disagreement as to what the nature of this specification amounts to; some claim that one needs to have true doxa about the object of inquiry, and others have suggested that having partial knowledge of that object is required. Let us call them “the True Doxa Solution” and “the Partial Knowledge Solution”, respectively. Before we turn our attention to these solutions, let us first go back to the solution discussed by Socrates in the text.

In response to Meno, Socrates talks about a theory he has heard from some priests and priestesses, which claims that learning by inquiry is only possible through the soul recollecting what it once knew consciously. This is commonly attributed to Plato and is known in the literature as his Recollection Theory. Now could it be that in order to inquire into something, we need to have known it in the first place but forgot it later? (Again I will not discuss whether Socrates or Plato in fact ever endorsed such a solution, and I refer the reader to Plato scholarship on this issue.) Now such a recollection may require us to have immortal and omniscient souls, as suggested by Socrates, which obviously makes the solution very implausible, but I will not make an issue of this given that there appears to be a more fundamental logical problem in this offered solution independent of what it has to presuppose concerning our souls. Before we get to it, note that this solution should equally apply to curiosity as well. If it were correct, we would have to conclude that one can only be curious about something that he knew earlier but later forgot. Although this claim appears to be obviously false for curiosity concerning empirical issues, it does have important implications concerning curiosity of matters that can be known a priori. In order to see the logical gap in this offered solution, what we need to do is to make the appropriate kinds of substitutions in the original formulation of Meno’s argument to notice that we get exactly the same kind of puzzle for recollection.³ Meno’s version may then read as,

And how will you recollect, Socrates, something when you don’t know at all what it is? Which of the things that you don’t remember will you propose as the object of your recollection? Or even if you really stumble on it, how will you ever know that this is the thing that you wished to recollect?

Socrates’ version could be stated as:

I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what an eristic argument you are introducing—that it is impossible for someone to recollect what he knows or does not know; he wouldn’t try to recollect what he knows, since he already knows it and there is no need for such a person to recolllect; nor into what he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t know what he is going to recollect.

Whatever the force the original puzzle has, it seems to me that this version has exactly the same. The reason is this: The Recollection Solution simply provides the location of the sought knowledge when we are engaged in an inquiry (namely, the soul), but the problem posed by the Paradox is not merely about where to look for something when engaged in an inquiry, rather it is a paradox about how it is possible to look for something in the first place. Whether the sought piece of knowledge is inside or outside of us is, no doubt, an extremely important matter concerning whether the sought knowledge is empirical or a priori, and Plato’s discussion of the matter is, no doubt, extremely important in understanding his position concerning the nature of philosophical and a priori knowledge. However, other than that, it does not even touch on the Paradox, unless it provides us with what the specification is that allows us to start an inquiry by attempting to recollect it and also allows us to recognize it when we have in fact revealed it; simply shifting our attention to the soul does not provide a solution to the Paradox, unless an explanation is given as to how inquiry by recollection is possible. So I take it that the Recollection Solution only provides a partial account, and as I shall argue later, it could only become a full solution if we provide an explanation of what it is that allows us to inquire into something by attempting to recollect it. Exactly the same is true of curiosity. When one is curious about an empirical matter, the Recollection Solution obviously does not apply, but curiosity that can only be satisfied a priori may call for such a solution, although it would still be considered quite implausible from a contemporary perspective. In any case it needs to be supplemented by an account of how we are able to become curious about a priori matters, which the solution does not address. In particular we need to give an account of how one is able to know what he is curious about that motivates an inquiry. It seems to me that this issue calls for exactly the same kind of solution regardless of whether the sought piece of knowledge is empirical or a priori. So let us set aside the issue of a priori curiosity.

It has been suggested by some Plato scholars that in order to inquire into something we should have true doxa about the thing we are looking for, which will also make it possible for us to recognize it when we come across it. Such a solution is offered therefore for the Paradox of Inquiry as well as the Paradox of Discovery, and some scholars believe that this was Plato’s own position on the matter.⁴ I will have nothing to say on whether this was or wasn’t the solution that Plato endorsed. However, I will have a few things to say about the notion of true doxa in relation to Plato’s work, if only to clarify the argument. The translation of Plato’s notion of “doxa” into English as “belief” could be misleading in that we normally understand the latter term as having a propositional content. It is not at all clear, however, whether Plato ever used the notion of proposition, in the sense in which most of us understand it today as being the semantic content of a full declarative sentence. Plato’s notion of episteme (or oida), which is generally translated as “knowledge” into English, runs into a similar difficulty. As it has been noted by various scholars, Plato, in using the term “episteme”, did not intend to talk about propositional knowledge; rather “episteme” refers to knowledge of a particular object, perhaps a form, that is not something that could be expressed by a declarative sentence, and thus, whatever it may be, it is not a proposition. In English we do make use of the verb “to know” in a similar sense as when we say “I know you” or perhaps “I know what virtue is”. However, the term “belief” does not have such a use in English. A sentence in the form [I believe x] cannot be completed by inserting a singular term in the place of x. Belief sentences are bound to be in the form [I believe that x] where x is a full declarative sentence. There is of course the notion of believing in something, but that is irrelevant to our issue.⁵ Now if Plato did not use the notion of episteme in a propositional sense, this may well be true for his use of doxa as well. But then we have a genuine translation problem here. Unlike our term “knowledge” that allows us to express a relation between a knower and an object (different from a proposition), our term “belief” does not. So even if we can get by, in translating “episteme” as “knowledge”, when it comes to “doxa”, we seem to have a problem. The problem gets even worse when we consider the notion of truth, for if doxa is something that could be true or false but is not itself propositional, then it is hard to make sense of the notion of true doxa. Some Plato scholars prefer the alternative translation of “doxa” into English as “opinion”, but it is not at all clear that our common notion of “opinion” could be taken in a non-propositional sense either. Clearly I am in no position to settle these translation issues here. So I will first give my argument against the True Doxa solution taking the notion of true doxa in the propositional sense, which would make it synonymous with true belief as we normally understand it. I shall leave it to the reader to assess whether the same argument has the intended force when we take this notion in a different sense. Even if it doesn’t, this will not be all that important because there is a stronger argument I will provide in the next section against the Partial Knowledge Solution that would be equally applicable against the True Doxa Solution even when the term “doxa” is taken in any other sense. I make an issue of these translation issues not merely for scholarly reasons; the distinction between objectual knowledge and propositional knowledge will be important for us to distinguish between ostensible and inostensible reference later.

As it has been noted by various commentators, the True Doxa Solution runs into a problem: suppose, for a reduction, that in order t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Meno’s Paradox and Inostensible Conceptualization
• 2. Asking and Answering
• 3. Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description
• 4. Referential and Attributive Uses of Definite Descriptions
• 5. De Re/De Dicto
• 6. Rigidity and Direct Reference
• 7. Reference to the Object of Curiosity
• 8. Conditions for Curiosity
• 9. Conditions for the Satisfaction of Curiosity
• 10. Relativity of Curiosity and Its Satisfaction
• 11. Presuppositions of Curiosity
• 12. Limits of Curiosity and Its Satisfaction
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index