SYNTHESE LIBRARY STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editor-in-Chief LUCIANO FLORIDI, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, United Kingdom Editors THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University of Groningen Fac. Philosophy, The Netherlands TEDDY SEIDENFELD, Carnegie Mellon University Dept. Philosophı USA PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University Ctr. Study of Language & Information, USA JAN WOLENSKI, Jagiellonian University of Krakow Institute of Philosophy, PoIand DIRK VAN DALEN, Utrecht University Department of Philosophy, The Netherlands VOLUME 366 For fuıther volumes: hnp://www. springer.com/serie V6607 Abrol Fairweather Editor Virtüe Epistemology NaturuIized Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology i* and Philosophy of Science .]''' Ö Springer Editor Abrol Fairweaüer Departrnent of Philosophy San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA, USA ISBN 978-3-3 l 9-04671-6 ISBN 978-3-3 l 9-04672-3 (eBook) DoI l 0. l 007/9,7 8 -3 -319 -0467 2-3 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2014939307 @ Springer International PubIishing Switzerland 20l4 This work is_ subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisheı whether the whole or paıt of the material is concemed, specifically the rights oftranslation, reprinting, reuse of iIlustrations, reciİation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology norv known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material suppIied specifically for the purpose of being entered and execut€d on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereofis permitted only under the provisions ofthe Copyright Law ofthe Pubıisher's location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained ürough Rightslink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Volations are liable to prosecution under the respeğtive Copyright Law. The use ofgeneral descriptive names, registered name§, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for generaI use. while the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor üe publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any erTors or omissions thaı may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with r.espect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Contents Bridges Betıreen Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science Abrol Fairweather Part I Epistemic Virfue, Cognitiv€ Science and Situationism The Function of Perception Peter J. Graham Metacognition and Intellectual Virtue Christopher Lepock Daring to Believe: Metacogrıition, Epistemic Agency and Reflective Knowledge.. Fernando Broncano Succesş.Minimal Agency and Epi§temic Virtue Carlos Montemayor Towards a Eudaimonistic Virtue Epistemology Berit Brogaard Expanding the Situationist Challenge to Reliabilism About rnference...... ....................... 103 MarkAlfano Inferential Abilities and Common Epistemic Goods |23 Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor l Part II Epistemic Virtue and Formal Epistemology Curiosity, Belief andAcquaintance |43 Ilhan Inan 13 33 49 67 83 vl Epistemic Values and Disinformation ..............,.. Don Fa]lis Defeasibility Without Inductivism Juan comesafra Part III Virtues of Theories and Virtues of Theorists Acting to Know: A Virtue of Experimentation............ Adam Morton Is There a Place for Epistemic Virtues in Theory Choice?--...... Milena Ivanova Bridging a Fault Line: On Underdetermination and the Ampliative Ade quacy of Competing Theories .................... Guy Axtell Epistemic Virtues and the Success of Science..... D. Tulodziecki Experimental Virfue: Perceptual Responsiveness and the praxis of scientific observation. shannon vallor A Matter of Phronesis: Experiment and Virtue in Physics, A Case Study ...,....... Marilena Di Bucchianico Part IV Understanding, Explanation and EpistemicVirtue Knowledge and Understanding Duncan pritchard Understanding as Knowledge of Causes Stephen R. Grimm Knowledge, Understanding and Virtue................... Cbristoph Kelp Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Phitosophy of Science Abrol Fairweather Contents 207 22,7 247 269 29| 3l5 329 347 159 18l t95 The essays collected here seek to establish bridges between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science (broadly construed, including the history of science, the use or,p".İn" scientific results to construct naturalistic philosophical theories, formal epistemology, modeting, theory choice, etc.). Since Ernest Sosa,s ground breaking essay "ıhe iatt and the ğramid" (19s0) andLindaZagzebski's Virtues of The Mind (ı996), epistemologists have become increasingly interested in üe normative aspects of knowledge, justification, understanding and other epistemic states_ Virtue epİstemologists ground our evaluation of human cognition in a general commitment to aretaic (or virtue theoretic), rather than deontologİcal or consequentİalİst norms.] Two broad defining features of virtue epistemology are often understood through the following principles: (a) knowledge and other important epistemic concepts ur" "**"r,tiully normative and (b) epistemically valuable states of agents confer epistemically valuable properties on their beliefs, not the other way around,2 Virtue episte-oıoğy thus borrows liberally from the rich tradition in virtue ethics for a range of noİmative fesources that have proven quite useful for epistemologists interested in addressing traditional problems regarding epistemic luck and epistemic value. while much more will be said about virtue epistemology below, and there are indeed many species of virtue epistemology on offer in contemporary literature, what unifies this movement can fruitfully be seen through the unique way virtue lThis is not to suggest that overtly normative epistemology was not happening plior to sosa and Zagzebski,s woİk, as Roderick Firth (1 978) and Roderick Chisholm had nicely articulated to rule-coisequentialist structure of reliabilist theories and the deontological structure of internalist theories respectively. 2The second commitment is typicaIly described as 'reversing the direction of analysis' for terms of epistemic appraisal. A. Fairweather (8) Department of Phitosophy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, UsA e-mail: afairweather@ gmail.com Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance Ilhan Inan Philosophers have paid little attention to curiosity until quite recently. There is now at least a scarce literature that discusses how curİosİty relates to certaİn İntellectual traits that we value such as inquisitiveness and open-mindedness, whether it is an essential instrument to lead us to certain epistemİc achİevements such as the acquişition of truth or knowledge, whether being curious is an intellectual, an ethical, or even a moral virtue, and wheüer curiosity is required for a good life.ı Most of this discussion takes place in an area where epistemology overlaps with ethics and value theory, generally known as virtue epistemology. Whether curiosity is taken to be a form ofvirtue or not, it should be clear that there are important connections between being curious and some of ourbasic epistemic attitude§ and achievements. Knowing, for instance, is an epistemic achievement, at lea§t in certain cases, and curiosity is one of its basic motivators. The question of how curiosity and knowledge are reiated brings about a host of interesting philosophical issues, the most important of which relates to what curiosity is.2 After all üe classical "definiüon" equate§ curiosity with a desire to know. There is then the important compıırative logical question: If knowledge is a propositional attitude, is curiosity so too? There are also issues conceming how curiosity relates not to knowledge, but rather its lSee Daston and Park (20Ol), Baumgarten (200l), Kvanvig (2003), Miscevic (2ü7} Schmitt and Lahroodi (2008), Brady (2009), Subasi (2009), Yigit (20l l). Apart from this lit€rature there has been very little discussion on some oflhe basic philosophical questions conctrning curiosİty, such as what curiosity is, what make§ it possible, how it is satisfied etc. See Kvanvig (2003) and especially Whircomb (2010). Though not directly on curiosity there is also some current relevant research on open-mindedness, inquisitiveness, love of truth and related issues: see Zagzebski (l96), Hookway (2003), Battaly (2008), Robert§ and Wood (2009), Riggs (20t0), Crisp (20l0), Baehr (20l 1). 2I am inclined to think that curiosity based knowledge has more value than what might be cal|ed "accidental" knowledge. If so this should provide good reason for virtue epistemologists to address philosophical questions on curiosity. I. Inan (a) Department of Philosophy, Bogazici University, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail : inanilha@boun.edu.tr 144 I. Inan opposite, namely ignorance. what are the mental mechanisms we employ which allow us to become aware of our ignorance on a particular issue, and how does this motivate curiosity? Is awareness of ignorance a precondition for curiosity? There are also related issues that concern how curiosity re]ates to the asking of a question. lf all knowing is in fact knowing the answer to a question, does it then follow that knowledge always originates from curiosity?3 How does our curiosity relate to the asking of a question, and how does the satisfaction of our curiosity relate to the answering of our question? How does curiosity motivate inquiry into the unknown? I have dealt with these and other related issues in detail in recent work.a Based on some of the ideas developed there, I now wish to elaborate on topics which should be relevant not just to virtue epistemology, but to epistemology in general, and especially to formal epistemology. These invo]ve how curiosity relates to some of our basic epistemic attitudes that come short of knowledge. Among them two stand out as being the most relevant, that is belief and acquaintance. How does curiosity relate to the holding of a belief that is uncertain and how does it relate to having partial acquaintante with an object? plenty of work has been done on belief, very little work has been done on curiosity, and to my knowledge there is no work, at least in the philosophy literature, that explicitly addresses the issue of how the two are related. To start off we may say that if you have a belief that is too firm, then there will be no room left for curiosity. If you are certain that plato was a philosopher for instance, then you cannot be curious whether that really was or was not the case. curiosity about whether a proposition is true or false can only take place under uncertainty. Here the notion of certainty should be taken in the "subjective" sense. It has to do with the epistemic attitude the subject takes with respect to the truth of a proposition. Being certain, in this sense, corresponds to maximum strengü of a belief. once that level is reached genuine curiosity becomes impossible. This is not a normative notion, rather it describes the mental state one is in. Being subjectively certain is not a factive mental state; that is a person may be subjectively certain that a given proposition is true, when in fact that proposition is false. If an ancient was certain that the world is flat, then he cou]d not have been curious about whether this was or was not in fact the case. people who are çertain of their beliefs may not always have the right to be certain. The evidence they have may not entitle them to be certain, but üey still may. That is why people who dogmatically hold beliefs cannot bring themselves to be curious about their beliefs without giving up üeir dogmatism. Fortunately, not everyone is like this. There are many rational open-minded people who hold beliefs without feeling certain that those be]iefs are true. The stronger your beliefgets the less possible it becomes to be curious. So it does appear that curiosity is inversely propositional to the strength of one's belief, or what in the Formal Epistemology literature is called "degree of belief'.s This is a particularly interesting notion that 3 Schaffer (2007) explicitly defends the view that knowing is always knowing the answer to a question; some ofCollingwood's (l940) ideas seem to imply it. I argue against this view in Inan (20l 2); see especially p.l47. aSee Inan (20'l2). 5For recent work on degrees of belief see Huber and SchmidlPetri (2009). Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance l45 connects epistemology with oüer branches of philosophy, as well other scientific disciplines. That is because the degree of our belief in the truth of a proposition partially determines how we are inclined to act, as well as how we ought act in a given context. It is a central notion concerning the norms ofrationality, and it is an essential concept to be utİlized in our attempts to explain and model üe human mind. Now just like beliei curiosity also comes in degrees. The degree of one's curİosİty İs one of the parameters that determines the strength of one's motİvatİon to leam something new. It is an instance of one of üe "passions of üe soul",6 as Descartes called it, which motivates inquiry. Understanding the epistemic features of the human mind, both descriptively and normatively should then require us to take into consideration curiosity. Once we integrate the notion of curiosity into the formal epİstemology literature we will have a better chance of understanding and İn effect mode]ing the human mind. We enjoy curiosity partially because we are fallible beings. The evidence we have for most of our beliefs about the external world, and perhaps even for some of our beliefs about our own minds, do not guarantee that those beliefs are true. Merely the fact that we are fallible beings however is not sufficient to explain our curiosity. Curiosity can only take place when we come to rea|ize the fallibility of our beliefs. It requires open-mindedness. And this can only take place in the absence of certainty. That is why utterances in the form "I am certain that p, but I am still curious whether p" can never express truths. Anything short of subjective certainty should then allow some room for curiosity. Even if you know that it is extremely improbable that a belief you hold might turn out to be false, you may still be curious about it. If you have a lottery ticket which you know that its chances of winning üe big prize is extremely slim, you may still be curious as to whether it will. In fact people who buy lottery tickets find the motivation to check the winning numbers which indicates that they are in fact curious as to whether theİr tİcket won. The more İnterestİng fact is that you may be curious whether your ticket will win even if you believe that it will not. That is, utterances in üe form "I believe that p, but I am curious whether p" are fine, and in fact express truths in certain contexts. Curİosİty, at least İn one of its forms, has to do wiü how much evidence one has for the truü of a proposition, and whether one takes that evidence as being conclusive: the less evidence there is, the more room for curiosity, Curiosity would then seem to have the potential of being maximized when there is no evidence on either side. I have access to no evidence foİ or against the truth of the proposition that there is intelligent life on other planets. I neither believe nor disbelieve it, and, of course, I am extremely curious about it. It would seem then that such cases of suspension of belief are ones which have üe potential to maximize the degree of one's curiosity. So'then, it initially appears as if the stronger one's belief gets the weaker the curiosity will become. Going back to the lottery case, suppose you pay one dollar for a lottery 6There are six primitive passions of the soul according to Descartes (l989). Among üem is wonder ("admiration" in the originat French) which is a "sudden surprise of Üe soul". Curiosity on the oüer hand is only a sub-species of another primitive passion, namely desire, and it is explicitly defined as "desire to understand" by Descartes. l46 ticket and will collect one million dollars if you win where your chances of winning is one in a million. Now you may be curious as to whether you will win, though the strength of your curiosity under normal circumstances wou]d not be too high. That is because the degree of your belief that you will win is close to zeto. But if you played anoüer game which had the same stakes, but very different odds things would appear to be different. Suppose you again bet one dollar, and then we flip a fair coin, and if it is heads you win a million dollars and if it is tails you win nothing. All else being equal, my hypothesis is that you would be a lot more curious as to whether you will win in this case compared to the lottery case. That is because, all else being equal, your degree of belief in the same proposition is now raised to the "medium" value, mostly represented as 0.5 in the [0, 1] interval, If we raised the odds so that this time the chances of you not winning is one in a million, the degree of your curiosity will go down once again, all else being equal. This appears to show that the degree of curiosity is inversely proportional to the degree of belief. Now some may object to this by pointing out that at times as the degree of belief goes higher so does one's curiosity. Suppose that after investigating the crime scene, Holmes becomes curious who the murderer is. Initially there are no suspects, but then Holmes finds good evidence that a certain Ralph, whom he knows from an earlier case, might be the murderer. He may in fact come to believe, but not know that Ralph is the ınurderer. Initially Ralph was not on Holmes' suspects list, there was no evidence to tie him with the murder. We may assume that at üis stage the degree of Holmes' belief in the proposition that Ratph is the murderer was 0.5. Noneüeless Holmes may not have been curious whether Ralph is the murderer. But then soon as he collects new evidence that makes Ralph a suspect, Holmes'degree of belief of the proposition that Ralph is the murderer now has come to be quite high. So the degree ofbeliefhas increased significantly, but contrary to what I said earlier, we may easily imagine that Holmes has now become curious whether Ralph is in fact üe murderer. So then it might seem in this case that the degree of one's curiosity increases with the increase in the degree of belief. And then this will go on until the peak is reaçhed, that is until the subject feels certain that he now knows üe proposition in question or its negation. So under this account, Holmes' degree of curiosity wi]l increase as he gathers more evidence that Ralph is the murderer; and once he comes to know that Ralph is or is not the murderer, then he will no longer be curious and the degree of his curiosity will suddenly drop to 0. This I believe is not fully accurate. When there was no evidence for or against the claim that Ralph is üe murderer Holrnes was not curious whether he was the one. Holmes became curious soon as he found some evidence which made Ralph a suspect. The earlier claim was that the degree of curiosity decreases as the degree of belief inçreases, all else being equal. What is important to note is that in Holmes' case not all else is equal. That is because at times new evidence may also increase oğr interesı. Curiosity is not merely related to our degree of belief, there is anoüer important parameter involved, namely our interest in the object of our curiosity. Initially Holmes wa§ not interested in Ralph, or to be more precise he was not interested in the truth of the proposition that Ralph is the murderer. After collecting evidence making Ralph a suspect, Holmes then became interested. The issue of how interest Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance and belief relate to one another is a tough one, but at lea§t how interest re]ates to curiosity should be quite clear: the degree of curiosity is directly proportional to üe degree ofinterest. As I said anything short of complete certainty allows for curiosity.7 This of course does not imply that we are curious about the truth ofjust any old proposition we entertain in our minds of which we are not certain. The proposition üat the number of words in the finished version of this article will be odd is not one that I have any evidençe for or against. I am not even §ure whether it has a determinate truth value. My degree of belief is 0.5, meaning that it i§ not even a belief that I hold. And not only do I not hold a belief one way or anothe1 I am simply not interested in the issue. It makes no difference for me, or anyone else for that matter, whether the number of words turns out to be even or odd in this article. If the editors of this issue had developed a weird policy of publishing only üose articles containing odd number of words, I might have had an interest in the topic. As it stands I don't. There are also many beliefs we in fact do hold, in which we again have no interest. After hearing the weather forecast, sayjust by accident, suppose you come to believe that it will rain today; yet you may not be curious whether it will or it wil] not rain today. You may simply not be interested in the topic. Lack of certainty only when accompanied with interest motivates curiosity. This is why you may hold two separate beliefs having the same degree, though you may be curious about the truth of one, and not the other, or you may be curious about both, but with different degrees. For instance, normally one's curiosity about something as trivial as the solution to a logic puzzle will not be as strong as one's curiosity about something as vital as the resu]t of a critical medical exam. That is because under normal cirçumstances we care about our health more than we care about üe so]ution to a puzz|e and therefore we have more interest in the former. The degree of one's curiosity is fundamentally linked with one's interests in general, and, as said earlier, it is directly proportional to the degree of interest in the truth of üe proposition one is curious about. Just like beliefand curiosity, interest also comes in degrees;the higher it gets üe more room there is for curiosity. Overall we might then conclude that for any subject and a proposition that that subject grasps, the degree of curiosity in the truth of that proposition will be inversely proportional to the degree of belief in the truth of that proposition, but it will be directly proportional to the degree of interest in the truth of that proposition. That of course does not tell us how exactly these three parameters relate to one another, but İt at least tells us that these are the parameters to consİder. If İnterest and belİef were İndependent attitudes, then there would have been a simple equation that connectş them with curiosity. However they are not İndependent attitudes. In fact interest interacts 7I hold that one can even be curious about something he or she knows, as long as that piece of knowledge is fallible and thus not certain in the subjective sense, Though an utterance such as "I know that the world population is greater than seven bi]lion, but I am not certain that this is the case and I am still curious whether it is so" does seem somewhat odd, it may very well express a truth. Given that this would appear to be a controversial issue, I do not pursue it here since my cuıTent focus is merely on how curiosity relates to belief. 14,7 148 I. Inan with belief in its own pecu}iar way, and without further inquiry into this interaction we should not jump to any conclusion. It would for instance be wrong to conclude that the degree of İnterest in the truth of a proposition is directly propoltİonal to the degree of belief in the truth of that proposition. One may lack interest in the truth of a proposition regardless of whether he or she has any evidence for it_ Whether üe number of words in this article is odd is an issue I have no interest in, and üat is total]y independent of my degree of belief in the truth of this proposition. Therefore we should conclude that the reason why Holmes becomes more interested in whether Ralph is üe murderer soon as he collects new evidence making him a suspect, cannot be merely due to the increase of his degree of belief. We should have to bring into consideration Holmes' interest in who the murderer is in order to explain the increase of his interest in whether Ralph is the murderer when he gathers new evidence making him a suspect. The most that can be said here is that the degree of one's curiosity is a function of his degree of belief and his degree of interest when there is a full proposition involved. The preceding discussion is applicable only to curiosity which has propositional content. That is not always the case. To see this, we should distinguish between two types of curiosity. If you are curiou§ about whether üere is life on other planets, your curiosity has propositional content: you wish to know the truth value of the proposition that there is life on other planets.8 But if you are curious about what Plato's father's name was, then there is no proposition you can single out as one whose truth value you are seeking. Or when Holmes is curious who the murderer is when he has no suspects, there is no particular proposition in the form [a is the mur_ derer] of which Holmes is curious to know. So my hypothesis is that being curious who someone is, or being curious when or where or how or why some event took place need not involve curiosity in the truth of a proposition. Though this distinction between two types of curiosity is far from being commonplace in philosophy or any other discipline, the coffesponding distinction between two types of questions was made more than a couple of millennia ago. Aristotle famously distinguished between "whether-questions" that ask for whether there is a "middle term" and l'whatquestions" that ask for what that middle term is.9 Today many distinguish between direct and indirect questions, where the former admit of "yes" or "no" as answers, but üe latter, which are also known as "wh-questions", do not.l0 If we assume that the use of interrogative sentences is our normal linguistic tool by which we express ouf curiosity, then we should expect that there are two types of curiosity as well. I will call curiosity expressible by a direct question "propositional curiosity", and sThis is in fact an oversimplification. At times we wish to know more than just the truth value of the proposition in question; we wish to know the fact that makes the proposition true. That is whY I hold üat there are two ways of satisfying propositionaI curiosity, de re and de dicto. For a discussion of this see Chapıer 2 Asking and Answering, and Chapter 9 Conditions for the Satisfaction of Curiosity in Inan (20l2). 9Aristotle (1924), Posterior Analytics, Book II, Chapter l , p.5a. IoIn contemporary philosophy the distinction was made by a number of philosophers. An early version can be found in Leonard (l957). Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance curiosity expressible by an indirect question "objectual curiosity". So even if we gave a satisfactory account ofhow degree ofbeliefand propositiona] curiosity relate to one other, that will not be sufficient. We will have to account for objectual curiosity as well which cannot be reduced to a propositional attitude. This will require us to introduce at least one new epistenic pafameter into our equation. The moral to be drawn from all this is that our epistemic attitudes which motivate us to act are not merely limited to the strengüs of our beliefs and interests. 'We are intellectually a bit more complicated than that. so I take it that propositional curiosity is what is expressible by a question in üe form "is it the case that s?" where s is a full declarative sentence that expresses a proposition. If we further assume that truth and falsity are properties of propositions, then the object of propositional curiosity will be an unknown truth value. If we put this in terms of a desire to know, then we may say that in such cases the curious subject desires to know which of the two truth vales a proposition has. In this sense we may take this form of curiosity as a propositional attitude of a peculiar kind. This is not the case though for objectual curiosity, i.e. curiosity that is expressible by a wh-question. ln such cases it is not that the degree of belief togeüer with the degree of interest are not sufficient to account for curiosity. Rather in these cases Üe notion of degree ofbeliefis no longer applicable. That is because objectual curio§ity is not propositional. In other words being objectually çurious is not a propositional attitude. We çan no longer account for curiosity in terms of belief, given that there is no such thing as "objectual" belief. The difference between the logical status of belief and objectual curiosity reveals itself in surface grammar. Sentences in the form "S is curious about the F"' are perfect constructions and are in fact used quite frequently, but there is no analogous construction for belief. When Holmes asks "who is the murderer of Smith?" out of curiosity, we may take that to mean that he is curious about the murderer of smiü. so "Holmes is curious about the murderer of Smith""expresses a truth, but "Holmes believes about the murderer of Smith" is ungrammatical. (There is of course one specific use of the verb to believe in which we say things like "Holmes believes John" and we might even say "Holmes believes the murderer", but that is obviously not an objectual attitude.) When we say that Holmes' curiosity is not propositional we do not wish to say merely that the interrogative sentence that he uses does not contain a full proposition. The claim is in fact a lot stronger than that. What we wish to say is that we cannot single out any proposition of which Holmes wishes to know whether it is true or false. There simply is no such proposition. Now some may perhaps wish to say that there is at least a certain long disjunctive proposition in which each disjunct is a Possible answer to the question. This long disjunction may be along the lines of "Ralph is the murderer of Smith or Brown is the murderer of Smith or . ..". And then we may say that Holmes wishes to know which disjunct is true. Now this might be true in certain cases. If Holmes has, say, four possible suspects, and he knows that the murderer is among them, üen he may have at his disposal a disjunction with four disjuncts. But that is on the assumption that Holmes has certain §uspects to form the disjunction. What if he is totally in the dark about the identity of the murderer? It might simply be the case that the murderer is totally unknown to Holmes and neither his name nor l50 [. Inan any other information about him appears in any of Holmes' files. He has no actual *rİp""tr, and not even possible ones, Nevertheless Holmes is curious who the muİderer is. Regardless of whether Holmes has suspects or not, it is important to notice here that being curious about who üe murderer is, is not üe same üing as being curious about which disjunct is true in a disjunction. If we can formulate a disjunction with all the possible an§wers to the question appearing as.Separate disJuncts, then it should be clear that Holmes cannot grasp this very long proposition. Oicourse Holmes knows very well what he is curious about; that is, being curious is a mental state, and Holmes has access to it. So given Üat he cannot Single out a certain proposition that he grasps as giving the content of his curiosity, we should conclude that his curiosity does not have propositional content. It is of course true that if Ralph is üe murderer and Holmes comes to know üis, then his curiosity will be satisfied. But that does not imply at all üat Holmes was curious about whether Ralph was the murderer. He may have never heard of Ralph before, and no information may have been available to him about Ralph initially when he was curious about the murderer. It is one thing to be curious about whether Ralph is the murderer, it is another to be curious about who the murderer is; the former is propositional the latter is not. I hold that these are very different mental states, Objectual curiosity is not propositional nor can be reduced to it, Now even ifyou are convinced that objectual curiosity is not propositional, you may be inclined to üink that at least its satisfaction is propositional. If Holmes is curious about the murderer, and Ralph is the one, then once Holmes comes to know that Ralph is the murderer he should have satisfied his curiosity. That is not always correct. That is because when Holmes comes to know that Ralph is the murderer, it does not immediately foltow that he knows who the murderer is. Suppose that Holmes receives an anonymou§ phone call from a man who claims to be the murderer. Let us assume üat caller is in fact the murderer and he manages to convince Holmes that this is the case by telling Holmes very specific detailed facts about the murder. Let us further suppose that Holmes now has come to know that üe caller is in fact the murderer. Even so Holmesstill knows very little about this guy, in fact even if the cal]er tells him that his name is "Ralph" it might make no diff"."n"". After all the name "Ralph" may be a made up name, and Holmes may still wonder who this person is. Under this scenario it would not be wrong for Holmes to assert that he does not know who üe murderer is.ll There is at least a strict use of the notion of knowing who under which this is the case. He might come Curiosity, Belief and Acquaıntance to know that Ralph is the murderer, and if he was asked who the murderer is he could say "It is Ralph", but that does not change the fact that he does not know who Ralph is; his degree of acquaintance with Ralph is not §ufficient. There have been actual cases like this. One was üe famous Unabomber case. Before üe suspect was caught, the police and the media had given the name "U4abomber" to the person who was responsible for a number of mail bomb incidents. Even the name all by itself aroused curiosity. People were curious about the Unabomber, given that üey did not know who he was. Now go back to early 1990s when the Unabomber sent one such mail to a university office. Initially the police may have been curious as to whether the Unabomber struck again, and wheüer he or someone else ri/as responsible. After investigating the evidence let us assume üat they found out that it was the Unabomber again who was responsible for this latest incident. That may have satisfied their curiosity whether the Unabomber was responsible for the latest incident, but they still did not know who he was. They were §ti]l curious about this. The satisfaction of objectual curiosity requires more than learning üat a certain proposition is true. It requires raising the degree of your acquaintance with the object of your curiosity to a certain level. What that level should be depends on one's interests and many other contextual factors. Reaching a certain degree of acquaintance of the object of curiosity may satisfy one but not §atisfy another, and even the same person may change his standards from one context to another.l2 What is important to note here is üat the police and the media and the interested public were curious about who the Unabomber was given üat their degree of acquaintance with this person was too low. All that they knew of him was what they were able to gather from the evidence of the bombs he had sent. And given that there was a lot of interest in the case, üere was a lot of curiosity.l3 So we may then wish to conclude that üere are two main pİırameters that deter_ mine the degree of one's (objectual) curiosity, namely the degree of interest and the degree of acquaintance. That would not be fully accurate. If you are curious about the colors of the Jamaican flag, that does not imply üat there are certain colors in this flag of which you have a low degree of acquaintance. It is not that you wish to know more about a certain coior and raise your degree of acquaintance with it. Rather given that you are already acquainted with the basic colors, you wish to know which ones appear in the Jamaican flag. In fact you may truthfully Say "I am acquainted with üe colors of the Jamaican flag", and then you may add "but I do not know which colors those are". If you have a particular interest in flags, then you may be t2For a more detailed discussion ofthis see chapter l0 Relativity ofcuriosity and Its kıtisfaction in Inan (20l2). t3I am in full agreement here with Kvanvig (2003) in his emphasis on the need to appeal to an objectual epistemic notion to explain our epistemic virtues. Kvanvig makes a further distinction beİween uİderstanding aıd knowledge, and places objectual understanding at the top of the ePistemic values. For the present purposes all üat I am committing myseif is the view üat in order to account for the satisfaction of curiosity we need to appeal to some epistemic notion that forms a relation between an agent and an object. It seems to me that our common use of Üe verb to know in the objectual sense caplures exactly this, though following Kvanvig we might prefer to rePlace it with the noIion of understanding. l5l llIt is commonplace in philosophy to hold that knowing who is an interest relative term, l have argued in my (zOı z) tnaİtııe reaİon for this is because in many contexts the notion of knowing who is-used elliptically for a longer notion, though there is also what I called a "strict use" of this notion that is non-elliptical and therefore not interest relative. Braun (2006) is perhaps the only one in the literature \,/ho -also argues against the interest relativene§s of knowing who. However the epistemic standards on Braun's view ofknowing who someone is, is so low that all it takes for one to know who someone is to know a property of thut p"r.on which need not even be a uniquely identifying one. obviously I disagree with Braun, for it appears that on his view we would not be able to expıess genuine curioslty by asking a who-question. See my (20l2, pp. 6G5l) for a discussion of Braun's position. 152 I. Inan curious about this even if you know that you are acquainted with the object of your curiosity (which is a set of colors in üis case). Curiosity does not always imply lack of acquaintance. As in this case, a curious subject may have a relatively high degree of interest, but also a relatively high degree of acquaintance with the object of his curiosity. If the degree of acquaintance is high, why should our subject be curious? The short answer to this question is Üat curiosity has conceptual content. What you lack in üis case is not acquaintance with certain colors, but rather you wish to know whiçh of those colors (that you are already acquainted with) fall under the concept the colors of the Jamaican flag.You are curious given üat you do not know which colors üis term refers to. Acquaintance is an extensional notion, whereas what we need is an intensional one, that is, we need a notion that is sensitive not only to the degree of acquaintance of the object of curiosity, but also to what concept you represent üat object in your mind. I will call this parameter "the degree of ostensibility". Roughly this notion applies to how the curious subject is epistemically related to an object under a concept, To be çurious about an object we need to be able to conceptualize iu the basic tool by which we achieve üat is by constructing a definite description whose referent is unknown to us, what I have called an "ınostensible term"|a relative to a subject, that is a term whose referent is unknown for that subject. The referent may be unknown because the subject may simply not have come across it before. Holmes may be curious about the murderer even when he has no suspects, and when he has no epistemic tonnection to the murderer except for whatever evidence there is at the murder scene. But we may also be curious about the referent even when we do have some close epistemic connection to it, when the referent is in fact an object we are partially acquainted with, and even when we know üat this is the case. If Holmes has sufficient evidence to come to know that the murderer is one of the two suspects boü of whom he knows to a certain degree, he may still be curious as to which of them is in fact the murderer. Satisfaction of curiosity takes place only when we come to know that a certain object is the referent of our inostensible term. For Holmes to satisfy his curiosity, he must be able to connect his inostensible term "the murderer" with one of the two suspects and come to know this. If Ralph is the murderer, Holmes must come to know Ralph as being üe murderer, where "Ralph" is an ostensible term for Holmes in that he knows üat this name refers to a person wit}ı whom he has some high degree of acquaintance. We may now say that the degree of ostensibility of a term d for a subject ^§ reaches its maximum level if üere is an object o such üat S is completely acquainted with o and,S knows that cı is üe referent of d. The degree of ostensibility will be very low if there is no object üat S is acquainted with which S knows to be the referent of d. And then üere will be intermediate cases in which there is an object o with which S has a certain intermediate degree of acquaintance. The degree of curiosity then is a function of two factors: degree of interest and degree of ostensibility. It is directly propoıtional to the former and inversely proportional to the latter. Acquaintance is by itself not one of the direct parameters that laSee Inan (2010,2012) for a detailed discussion of the distinction between ostensible inostensible terms. Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance determines curİosity and İts degree. Note that acquaintance İs an epİstemİc relatİon between an object and a subject; it is a purely extensional relation rather than an intensional one. That is because the acquaintance relation says nothing about how the subject conceptualizes the object in question. Presumably üis is not true for propositional knowledge orbelief. When you §ay Sue knows üat üe world is round, you do say something about how she conceptualizes a certain fact. Bu when you say that Sue is acquainted with Ben, you say nothing about how Sue conceptualizes Ben. Now it might be the case that acquaintance a|ways requires a form of conceptualization, i.e. in order for Sue to be acquainted with Ben she must have some kind of mental representation of Ben which has conceptual content. Or one might follow Russell here and hold that there is direct acquaintance with some kinds of entities that is preJinguistic having no conceptual content. Either way it is a fact üat an acquaintance attribution in üe form [S is acquainted with o] says nothing about how the subject conceptualizes the object. This is exactly why acquaintance together with interest are not sufficient to explain curiosity. I claim that curiosity always requires the representation of an unknown object. That kind of representation for us has conceptual content. If üere are other forms of representation that we, or §ome animals, or some extra-terrestrial beings employ, then there are oüer forms of curiosity that do not have conceptual content. Still the curious being must be able to represent something unknown; without it Üere is no curiosity. That is why some animals or infants who exhibit novelty seeking behavior, and try to explore their environment are not necessarily curious beings on my account. Wandering is not wondering. To wonder, in the sense of being curious, one must have the ability to attempt to single out something unknown and seek it. This requires a higher order mental capability than simply having the instinct or drive to be attracted to novel things in the environment. So even if one may make a tase t}ıat there can be curİosity with no conceptual content, üere cannot be curiosity without the ability to represent the unknown. This kind of representation is what I take to be a form of purported reference, (which I call "inostensible reference".) Every curious being attempts to refer to an unknown; if there in fact is such a thing, üen reference may succeed, if there is no such thing then it fails. Either way there is an attempt to refer to the object ofcuriosity. It is in this §ense that curiosity is an intentional as well as intensional mental state. It is intentiona] in the sense that it is directed towards an object (though it may turn out üat there is no such object), and it is intensional in the sense that it has representatİonal content. That representatİonal content when expressed in language is captured by an interrogative sentence. Given that sentences have conceptual content, it follows that human curiosity expressible in language has conceptual content. This is exactly why we cannot account for objectual curiosity by appealing to the notion of acquaintance alone. Acquaintance is an extensional notion, but what is needed is an intensional notion such as ostensibility. Objectual curiosity requires one to grasp a concept which determines the object of one's curiosity. The degree of curiosity is then a function of the degree of ostensibility of that concept. The notion of acquaintance is sti]l relevant, but in an indirect way. We may def,ne the ostensibility of a concept for a subject in terms of the degree of acquaintance of the object (determined by that concept) under that concept. ı53 l55|54 I. Inan This account takes acquaintance as admitting ofdegrees. That was not the case for Russell who took "acquaintance" to be an absolute notion, an all or nothing affair. Russell did however distinguish between different stages of "removal from acquaintance": It will be seen that there are various stages in the removal from acquaintance with particulars: there is Bismarck to people who knew him, Bismarck to those who only know of him through history, the man with the iron mask, the longestJived of men. These are progressively further removed from acquaintance with particulars. ..r5 Once we lower Russell's standards of acquaintance, then it should fo]low that what he calls "the stages of removal from acquaintance" can simply be captured by üe notion of "the degrees of acquaintance". Note that on Russel]'s account all these examples in the quote above are cases of what Russell called "knowledge of üings". There were two forms of it; knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by descrİptİon: Bİsmarck knows hİmself by acquaintance, and we know Bİsmarck by description. In the terminology adopted here this would imply that Bismark's degree of acquaintance was maximum (say 1), but since our knowledge of him is indirect and mostly based on testimony of others our degree of acquaintance whatever it is, is less than l. For a good historian who specializes in that period that degree may be quite high, for oüers it may be lower. The lower it gets the more room there will be for curiosity. If all I know about Bismarck is üat he was a famous historical figure, I might then be curious about him. I could express this in a question form: Who is Bismarck? Now üe problem with this c]assical piece by Russell is that it says a lot about knowledge but nothing about ignorance and obviously nothing about curiosity. There is, I believe, an intuitive cut offpoint between the four stages of removal from acquaintance that Russell talks about. Bismarck had knowledge of himself by acquaintance and we know him through history, but what about the man with the iron mask, and especially the longest-lived of men? These are supposed to be two cases of knowledge by description on Russell's account. It seems clear to me that they aren't. I do not know the longest lived of men. It is simply wrong to attrİbute to me knowledge of him. The degree of ostensibility reaches a very low level in such cases. That is why we easily become curious. That is I do not know of any individual as being üe longest lived of men, which is exactly what makes the definite description "the longest lived of men" inostensible. If I have an interest in üe topic, I could become curious about who in fact was the man with the iron mask or the longest lived of men. It will be more difficult to bring yourself to be curious about who Bismarck is, if you know a lot about him. The more you know the more difficult it will become. Just like a degree of belief that is short of complete certainty will allow for curiosity, a degree of ostensibility that is short of full acquaintance under a concept will leave some room for curiosity.16 15Russel] (l9l0), p. 1 l6. |6Fora more detailed discussion ofthis see CDapıer 3, Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description, in Inan (20l2). Curiosity, BeIief and Acquaintance Finally let me note that in dealİng with propositional curiosity the central notion that I have appealed to, namely, degree of belief can perhaps be cashed out in terms of the notion of degree of ostensibilify. If one takes the object of propositional curiosity to be an unknown truÜ value, üen we may tran§late every such case into an inostensible definİte description that refers to one of üe two truth values (or to some other value if one subscribes to many-valued system of logic.) If you are curious about wheüer üere is ]ife on other planets, then, under this account, what you wish to know is the referent of the definite description "üe truü value of the proposition that there is life on other planets". This is the inostensible term that gives rise to your curiosity. If your degree of belief regarding this proposition is 0.5, then the degree of ostensibility of the definite description will be at its minimum, namely 0. And if you have a degree of belief that is higher, then the degree of ostensibility of the definite description "the truth value of the proposition üat ..." will also be higher. If so, then degree of belief will simply be a special case of degree of ostensibility. The degree of ostensibi]ity of a whole declarative §entence is also a function of the degree of ostensibility of its constituent terms. Consider a simple sentence in the subject/predicate form, and suppose S knows with complete certainty the proposition expressed by it. In this case the degree of belief for S is 1. Now normally that would imply that the degree of ostensibility is also 1 for S. That however is not always the case. The degree of ostensibility of a sentence is a function of not only the degree of belief, but also the degrees of ostensibility of the constituent parts of the sentence. I know wİü complete certainty that the 12ü perfect number is not a prime. That is because I know that no perfect number is a prime, not because I have calculated the 12th perfect number and discovered üat it was not a prime. Though my degree of belief is 1, my degree of ostensibility is significantly lower. It cannot be higher than the degree ofostensibility ofthe subject term "üe 12th perfect number", which is quite low because I do not know what number it refers to. Al1 I can claim to know about this number is what I can immediately deduce from the description together with my background knowledge of perfect numbers. The degree of ostensibility also applies to the predicate term within that sentence. Now given that I know what a perfect number is, and that I know a few examples, my degree of ostensibility is quite high. That might not always be the case. There can be a predicate term that one grasps without knowing what property is denoted by it. If I ask you what color your lover's eyes are, and you answer by saying that üey are your favorite color, I will have learnt something new, but I still may not know what color your lover's eyes are if I don't know your favorite color. So if you utter the sentence "my lover's eyes are my favorite color", the degree of ostensibility of the subject term would be reasonably high for me assuming that I know your lover to some extent, but the degree of ostensibility of the predicate term would be quite low for me given that I do not know your favorite color. We may also imagine that I have no clue as to who your lover is, and know noüing about her except that she is your lover and whatever else I can deduce from that. In such a case my degree of ostensibility of the subject term will also be very low. So it is possible to know that a proposition about a person is true even when you do not know who is being talked about and what is being said about her. Ofcourse l56 [. Inan I know that üe proposition is about your lover, and if §ome third party were to ask me who you are talking about I could truthfully say "he is talking about his lover", but that does not change the fact that I do not know who your lover İs, İfwe give the term "knowing who" what I have called its strict use.l7 The degrees of ostensibility for both the subject as well as the predicate terın may be close to 0, and yet I may still know üat the proposition is true. If I take your word for it, then I may come to know that your lover's eyes are your favorite color. My degree of belief might be very high, close to 1, but my degree of ostensibility is nonetheless very low. That is why I hold that üere are two ways to satisfy propositional curiosity, de re and de dicto.t8 Merely coming to know that the proposition is true will give you de dicto satisfaction. You will come to know that there is a fact that makes the proposition true, but you are still in üe dark as to what constituents that fact has. You know üat a certain person has a certain property, but you neither know who that person is, nor what property is being predicated of her. That is why the degree of ostensibility of the whole sentence is very low. In order to satisfy your curiosity de re you need to raise it, and to do that you have to come to know that person and üe property attributed to her. This will put you in touch with that fact. Merely de dicto satisfaction gives you what I have called inostensible knowledge, whereas de re satisfaction gives you ostensible knowledge. Propositional knowledge and beliefattributions are not fine grained enough to distinguish between these two cases. AcknoırIedgments I wish to üank Safiye Yiğit for comments on an earlier draft, and Abrol Fairweather, Alev Çınar, Ayça Boylu, and my students in my graduate seminar on Truth and Reference I gave in 2O12 atBoğaziçi University for their support. This work has been funded by Scientific Research Fund of Boğaziçi University; Tit!.e,. The Epistemic, Semantic, and Eıhical Dimensions of Curiosity; Code Number: BAP l2BO2P3. References Aristotle. 1924. Metaphysics: A revised texı with introduction and commentary. hinceton: hinceton University Press. Baehr, Jason. 2O11. The inquiing mind: On intellecıual virtues and virtue epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University hess. Battaly, Heather. 2008. Vrtue epistemology. Philosophy Compass 3(4):639-663. Baumgarten, E. 200l. Curiosity as a moral yiftue. Internııtional Joumal of Applied Philosophy l5(2): l69-184. Brady, M. 2009. Curiosity and the value of truth. ln Epistemic value, ed. A. Haddock, A. Millar, and D. hitchard,265-283. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braun, D. 2006. Now you know who Hong Oak Yun is. Philosophical Issues 16(1):2442. Collingwood, R.G. l940. Chapter 4: On Presupposing. In An essay on metaphysics, ed. R. Martin. oxford: clarendon press. Crisp, Roger. 2010. Virtue ethics and virtues epistemolo1y. Metaphilosophy 41:1-2. 11 See Chapter 2, Asking and Answering, in Inan (20i2). |8For a more detailed discussion ofthe distinction between de re and de dicto satisfaction ofpropositional curiosity see Chapıer 9, Conditionsfor the Saıisfaction ofCuriosity, in Inan (20l2). Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance §7 Daston, L., and K. Park. 2001 . Wonders and the order oJ' nature, ] l 50-] 750. Cambridge: MIT hess. Descartes, R. l 989. The Passions of the SouI. Trans. and annotated by Stephen Voss. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. HookwaY, Christopher.2003. How to be a virtue epistemologist. In /ntellectualvinue: Perspectives from ethics and epistemology, ed. Michael Depaul and Linda zagzebski. oxford: oxford University Press. Huber, F., and C. SchmidÇPetri (eds.). 2ü9. Degrees of belief, Dordrecht: Springer. Inan, I. 20l0. lnostensible reference and conceptual curiosity. Croaıian Joumal of Philosophy X(28):2l4l. |nan,I.2012. The philosophy of curiosity. New York/London: Routledge. Kvanvig, J.2003.The value ofknowledge andthe pursuit ofunderstanding.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leonard, H.S. l957. An introduction to the principles of right reason. New York: Henry Holt. Miscevic, N. 2007. Vrtue -based epistemology and the cenüality of truth: Towards a strong virtueepistemology. A cta Analytica 22(3): 239-266. Riggs, Wayne. 20 1 0. Open-min dedness. M e t aphil o s o phy 4 l : 1 -2. Roberts, R.C., and W.J. Wood. 2009. Intellectual virtues: An essay in regulative episteınology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, B. l910. Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Proceedings ofıhe Ariştoteltan Society l t : |08-1 28. Schaffeı J.2M'7. Knowing the answer. Philosophy and Phenomenologicat Research 75(2): 383_403. Schmitt, F.F., and R. Lahroodi. 2008. The epistemic value of curiosity. Educaıional Theory 58 l 25-148. Subasi, A. 2009. Dynamics of scienıific,curiosily. Master's thesis in cognitive science. Bogazici University. Whitcomb, D. 20l0. Cuıiosity was framed. Philosophy and Plrenomenological Research 81(3): 664-687. Yigit, S. 2O1l . Curiosity as an intellecıual and ethical virtue. Master's thesis. Bogazici University. Zagzebski, L.T. 1996. Vrtuesof themind:Aninquiryinıothenatureof virıueandtheethical fountlaıions of knowleı}ge. NewYork: Cambridge University Press.