Curious to Know

Episteme 21 (3):758-772 (2024)
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Abstract

What is curiosity? An attractive option is that it is a desire to know. This analysis has been recently challenged by what I call interrogativism, the view that inquiring attitudes such as curiosity have questions rather than propositions as contents. In this paper, I defend the desire-to-know view, and make three contributions to the debate. First, I refine the view in a way that avoids the problems of its simplest version. Second, I present a new argument for the desire-to-know view that focuses on ascriptions of the form ‘S is curious to ϕ’, which, despite their prevalence, have been ignored in the literature. Third, I examine the central motivation for interrogativism – the argument from metacognition, according to which animals can be curious yet do not have the metacognitive capacities required by desires to know – and argue that it rests on questionable assumptions about desires and attitude ascriptions.

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original Haziza, Eliran (2022) "Curious to Know". Episteme 0():1-15

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Eliran Haziza
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Citations of this work

Asking expresses a desire to know.Peter van Elswyk - 2025 - Philosophical Quarterly 75 (1):254-267.

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References found in this work

Knowledge in a social world.Alvin I. Goldman - 1991 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Why Suspend Judging?Jane Friedman - 2017 - Noûs 51 (2):302-326.
Inquiry and Belief.Jane Friedman - 2017 - Noûs 53 (2):296-315.
The Theory of Epistemic Rationality.Richard Foley - 1987 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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