Zeynep Üsüdür / Need to Know! – A Philosophical Analysis of Curiosity

Billede zeynep

Systematic philosophical inquiries into the nature of curiosity are very few, which is surprising since curiosity as a phenomenon is considered to have great cultural value within areas of education, creativity and innovation. The aim of nurturing curiosity is directly written into many science curricula.

Furthermore, there is a great acknowledgement within current empirical research that contradictory cognitive-psychological descriptions of curiosity call for conceptual clarification of the theoretical framework guiding the formulation of hypotheses and the designing of empirical tests of curiosity.

Educational theoretical and psychological approaches to curiosity has mainly been motivated by interests concerning the pragmatic value of and techniques to foster curiosity. These are important aspects of curiosity, but require that we know what curiosity is.

Therefore, the aim of my Ph.D. project at CFS is to ask the question “what is curiosity?” and to provide a theoretical framework for a concise understanding of curiosity as a mental phenomenon. This I aim to do by focusing on essential aspects of the experience of curiosity from a phenomenological perspective.

A first step towards a phenomenology of curiosity will be to map relevant aspects of the experience of curiosity. Since an attempt to develop a phenomenology of curiosity has not yet been undertaken, and I need to start somewhere, I will take my point of departure in existing conceptualizations of the nature of curiosity. These are both to be found in analytical philosophy, the history of philosophy and psychology.

One crucial and problematic aspect of curiosity is the nature of its motivational force. Another aspect is the question of the value of curiosity. While psychological approaches to curiosity focus on the first aspect, the relation of curiosity to the value of truth has been the main target of interest in philosophy.

Psychological descriptions of curiosity are divided between interpretations of curiosity as a cognitive motivation caused by negative feelings of deprivation and curiosity as a cognition motivation caused by positive feelings of interest. The focus here is on the question of what it feels like for the curious person to be curious, rather than the aim and object of curiosity. The lack of interest for the aim and object of curiosity manifests itself in a manifold of qualitative tests and measurements of curiosity directed at different but often contradictory phenomena labeled under the same name.

In philosophy, on the contrast, the relation between curiosity and the value of knowledge has been all-dominant. Thus, the focus has not been on the intrinsic qualities of curiosity as a mental phenomenon, but rather the value of curiosity in relation to different kinds of objects of knowledge. The focus on the value of knowledge (and truth) has left us with a very vague concept of curiosity as the want to know something just for the sake of knowing it.

A phenomenological approach might provide a more profound understanding of curiosity by opening up the phenomenon in relation to categories such as, motivation, interest, imagination, aim, object, freedom, subjectivity, etc.

Zeynep Üsüdür/12-05-2016

 

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