The Moral Psychology of Curiosity

Ilhan Inan, Lani Watson, Dennis Whitcomb, Safiye Yigit

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786606723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Curiosity has taken a winding path through intellectual history, from Early Christian vice to Enlightenment virtue and beyond. This original volume sees contemporary philosophers and psychologists examining the nature and value of curiosity, shedding light on some of its most interesting features and exploring its role in human experience. Authors examine the nature and history of curiosity, the psychology of curiosity and its relationship to interest, understanding, and desire, the impact of language in shaping our curiosity, the cultivation and measurement of curiosity, and the vital part that curiosity can and should play in education. With perspectives on curiosity from all over the world, this diverse, interdisciplinary collection provides an in-depth and multi-faceted examination of the epistemological, psychological, moral, and educative dimensions of curiosity.

Part I

NATURE OF CURIOSITY

Chapter 1

Curiosity, Truth, and Knowledge

Ilhan Inan¹

When we say on a particular occasion that so-and-so is curious about such-and-such, we do not thereby wish to attribute to them a character trait, a drive, or an instinct, nor do we wish to assert that they have behaved in a certain way or are disposed to do so. Being curious, in this sense, is to be in a peculiar kind of mental state that all normal human beings enjoy, some more and some less, but regardless of their social and educational background no person is deprived of it. To be attracted to novelties, to seek new sensations, to exhibit exploratory behavior does not require one to be in that state of mind. Wandering is not wondering. To wonder at something, in the sense of being curious, is an intentional mental state in that it requires the mind to focus its attention on a specific item that it represents as being unknown. This form of representation, at least for normal adults who have mastered a language, can be expressed in language and has conceptual content. Putting aside the issue of whether there can be another form of representation that is not conceptual and does not require the mastering of any language, or whether there can be conceptual curiosity that is ineffable, curiosity that can be put into words may then be said to be intensional. Every case of curiosity that can be put into words can be expressed by an inostensible term whose referent is unknown to the curious being. The referential character of the inostensible term is what makes curiosity intentional, and the conceptual content of it is what makes curiosity intensional. I call this the intentional-intensional model of curiosity. Instances of curiosity that are expressible by wh-questions nicely fit into this model. Curiosity that is expressible by a question that has propositional content, on the other hand, is more problematic. Detecting its intensionality is easy, for the content is a proposition, but how to give an account of its intentionality is more difficult than it may first appear. In this chapter I take up this issue and argue that being curious is not always to seek truth or knowledge; by distinguishing between what I call ostensible and inostensible knowledge, I argue that the acquisition of propositional knowledge does not always satisfy one’s curiosity.

1. OBJECTUAL CURIOSITY

The intentional-intensional model provides a relatively simple analysis of what may be called “objectual” curiosity. These are cases in which one is curious about an entity that is represented under a certain concept, where that concept is never a full proposition. Such instances of curiosity are always expressible by a wh-question.² The fact that the content of curiosity in such cases cannot be given by a full proposition is revealed at the linguistic level; the inostensible term that purports to refer to the object of curiosity is not a declarative sentence, but rather a simpler singular term that is, in most cases, a definite description, though it could also be a simple general term, or even a proper name. If, for instance, you are curious about what the capital of Rwanda is, your curiosity is about the referent of a definite description, which is inostensible in your idiolect. The conceptual content of the description, the capital of Rwanda, is what allows you to form a representation of a city unknown to you, and the referent of the description is the object of your curiosity. That object in this case is a city, with all its streets and monuments; it is not a concept or any intensional entity as such. One may be curious about such entities as well, but this is not such a case. If you were to be curious what thauma meant in ancient Greek, then the object of your curiosity would be the meaning of a word; and if you were to be curious about the philosophical concept most frequently used by Aristotle, your curiosity would be about a concept. The content of curiosity in such cases would have second-order conceptual content. None of this is true for the capital-of-Rwanda case. There is no restriction on the kind of object one may be curious about as long as one is able to conceptualize the entity in question: If you are curious about who Plato’s mother was, your curiosity is about a woman; if you are curious about the closest planet to Earth on which there is liquid water, your curiosity is about a planet; if you are curious about what the 98th prime is, your curiosity is about a number; if you are curious about the last common ancestor of humans and chimps, your curiosity is about a species; if you are curious about why dinosaurs became extinct, you are curious about a cause; if you are curious about why Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, you are curious about a reason; if you are curious about when you will die, you are curious about a time, etc. In each and every instance of curiosity, the curious mind is curious about some entity that is unknown to it under the way in which it is represented. I call this form of representation that arouses curiosity, and, more importantly, makes curiosity possible, “inostensible.” It is our aptitude for inostensible representation that allows us to be curious, express this in the form of a question, start an inquiry to find its object, and, in effect, to extend our knowledge.

Objectual curiosity that arises out of inostensible representation is common in scientific practice, and in many instances, it has led to novel discoveries. There is good historical evidence, for instance, that there was curiosity about Neptune long before it was discovered. Assuming that the planet that we today call “Neptune” was, in fact, the very same planet that was predicted by Le Verrier and others as being the planet perturbing Uranus, we may conclude that these curious minds were able to think about and refer to an unknown planet prior to its discovery. The chemical element helium was given a name before it was discovered, whose reference was fixed by a description, as the element causing a bright yellow light in the solar spectrum, which at the time referred to an unknown entity. The name helium at the time was an inostensible name given that its reference-fixing description was inostensible, which had the potential of arousing the curiosity of the interested scientists. More recently it appears that scientists were curious about an undiscovered elementary particle whose existence was predicated by the Standard Model, which was given a name almost half a century prior to its discovery: the Higgs boson. Again, assuming that there has indeed been a discovery and that the newly discovered elementary particle was, in fact, the particle predicted by Higgs and others, again we may then conclude that the curiosity here involved successful reference to the object of curiosity.

Though curiosity is an intentional mental state, there is, of course, no guarantee that the object to which it is directed, in fact, exists. When the relevant inostensible term fails to refer, then there simply is no object of curiosity. Such was the case concerning the name Vulcan, which was supposed to refer to the planet that was hypothesized to have been responsible for the so-called perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. There is no reason not to assume that Le Verrier was curious about what he thought to be an undiscovered planet just like he was curious about Neptune. But unlike the Neptune case, it turned out that the Vulcan hypothesis was, in fact, mistaken, and that there really was no such planet perturbing Mercury, at least not in the predicted way. Similarly, in order to account for the so-called actions-at-a-distance problem, Newton came up with the ether hypothesis that he and many of his successors made various attempts to verify, all of which failed. Now, it is reasonable to assume that people who took the ether hypothesis seriously were curious, and if they were curious about something, it was a substance that they called “ether.” If it is now established that the hypothesis was mistaken and that there is no such thing as ether, then there is a sense in which these curious minds were curious about nothing. Curiosity in such cases is not about nonexistent entities. It would be a mistake to conclude that Le Verrier was curious about a nonexistent hypothetical planet; it would also be wrong to conclude that Newton was curious about a hypothetical nonexistent substance. It would be wrong to draw such conclusions, not because the Meinongian ontology they presuppose is mistaken. Even if one does countenance beings that do not exist and allow hypothetical planets or substances in their ontology, these would still not be the appropriate kind of entity that could count as the object of curiosity of Le Verrier or Newton. Le Verrier wished to know about an actual planet, not a hypothetical one, and Newton wished to discover a physical substance; their desire for knowledge was not directed toward an abstract entity that turned out not to have physical existence. Though curiosity is itself not a desire, it typically causes a desire for knowledge or understanding. So one way to find out what a person is curious about is to ask that person what they wish to know. Had we put this question to Le Verrier in the case of Vulcan, he surely would not have said that he wished to know more about an entity that might turn out to be a nonexistent planet; his curiosity and his desire for knowledge were directed toward what he took to be a real planet, and once he found out that there was no such planet, his curiosity was sated. Claiming that the object of curiosity in such a case is a hypothetical nonexistent planet is tantamount to saying that the name Vulcan refers to such an entity. Le Verrier would be the first to acknowledge that this is not the case. Curiosity then is an intentional mental state that is directed toward an entity, though it does not require the existence of that entity. Of course, if we are not skeptics, we would hold that in many “normal” cases, the object of curiosity does, in fact, exist.

To say that the intentional-intensional model nicely accommodates objectual curiosity does not imply that in each and every case we can easily detect its object. There are many cases of curiosity that are based on shaky or controversial ontological grounds, which makes it more difficult to determine what the inostensible term in question is, what it is supposed to refer to, and whether there is or can be such a referent. Our curiosity that involves counterfactual considerations is a paradigm case. People have been curious, for instance, about what would have happened in the Middle East had the United States not invaded Iraq. Here, in order to give an account of what the curious mind is representing, and to decide whether such an entity could exist, one would have to do some serious philosophy concerning counterfactuals. The curious mind, however, may be totally ignorant of such philosophical issues. Curiosity about the future is another problematic area. There is no guarantee that there is an actual object of curiosity when one is curious about, say, what the world population would be in some distant future, whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow, etc., which relates to the time-honored problem of the so-called future contingents. Normative curiosity is another interesting area: When one is curious about what one should do, one does seem to presuppose that its underlying inostensible description, the act I should perform, does, in fact, refer to an unknown act-type. In certain contexts, reference may go through; in others it may not. All in all, the main point is that the intentionality of objectual curiosity does not always provide us with an unproblematic entity, nor does it entail the existence of its object.

Philosophical curiosity expressed by our typical what-questions is itself a topic that deserves special attention. What is it that we are curious about when we raise a question such as “What is beauty?” Is the object of curiosity a concept, a Platonic form, a property, a universal? Or is it something that can be referred to only by a description, such as the nature of beauty, the essence of beauty, or the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being beautiful? For every such interpretation, we would get a different inostensible term. If the object of curiosity is taken to be the concept of beauty itself, we would have to conclude that the concept is unknown to us. But if the concept was completely unknown, then we would not even be in a position to grasp the very question we are asking, given that this concept is a part of it. One may perhaps appeal to the Leibnizian idea that our grasp of a concept is never complete. We could then say that we have a partial grasp of the concept of beauty, which is sufficient enough for us to raise the what-question about it. Under such a view, our goal may be to gain better grasp of the concept through philosophical (as well as empirical) experience. Ones who are not fond of the idea of a partial grasp of concepts may deny this. They may still hold that though our grasp of the concept of beauty may be complete, it may still be an inostensible concept. If so, we should ask: What makes it inostensible? To answer this question, we would have to distinguish between the concept that a general term such as beauty expresses and what it designates. What does a general term like beauty designate? Given that there simply is no consensus on this issue, detecting the object of curiosity for such philosophical questions would require us to take a position on how and to what general terms as such refer. So when I claim that the intentional-intensional model accommodates objectual curiosity expressible by a wh-question, I do not mean to imply that in each and every such case, the object of curiosity can be detected easily. It may even turn out that such philosophical questions are based on insotensible terms that lack referents.

Let us now turn our attention to curiosity whose content involves a full proposition.

2. PROPOSITIONAL CURIOSITY

To my knowledge within the scarce philosophical literature on curiosity, the distinction between objectual and propositional curiosity has only recently been explicitly formulated.³ One reason for this may have to do with the propositional-bias that appears to be very dominant nowadays. The fact that contemporary epistemology concentrates so much on propositional knowledge while sparing so little attention on objectual knowledge, or other such objectual epistemic verbs, is one good indicator that most philosophers tend to deplore the use of such objectual talk. This strong trend appears to have dominated not just epistemology, but other subdisciplines within contemporary philosophy as well. In order to understand the nature of curiosity, I believe, we have to overcome our propositional-bias. As I stressed, being curious about whether such-and-such is the case, is different from being curious about who someone is, or where something is, or what something is, or why or how something happened. Only in the former type of curiosity can we isolate a full proposition whose truth value is being sought. A simple indicator of this difference is revealed by the fact that the question that expresses the curiosity in the former case can be answered by a simple “yes” or “no,” whereas no matter what content we attribute to the latter case, the question posed can never be answered as such. This is because the former type of curiosity is propositional, whereas the latter is objectual. Now, one reason we may be tempted to think that curiosity must always have propositional content is because whenever we are curious, and no matter what form our curiosity takes, there will always be a proposition out there, such that, onc...