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ABSTRACT.
In this essay, Frederick Schmitt and Reza Lahroodi explore the value of curiosity for inquiry and knowledge. They defend an appetitive account of curiosity, viewing curiosity as a motivationally original desire to know that arises from having one's attention drawn to the object and that in turn sustains one's attention to it. Distinguishing curiosity from wonder, the authors explore several sources of the epistemic value of curiosity. First, curiosity is tenacious: curiosity whether a proposition is true leads to curiosity about related issues, thereby deepening our knowledge. Second, it is to some extent biased in favor of topics in which we already have a practical or epistemic interest. Third, and most important, curiosity is largely independent of our interests: it fixes our attention on objects in which we have no antecedent interest, thereby broadening our knowledge. Schmitt and Lahroodi elucidate the value of curiosity by outlining its role in levels of development - an approach indebted to John Dewey's explanation of the value of curiosity. Finally, they raise some questions about the implications of their account for educational practice.
It is a commonplace that curiosity facilitates education and inquiry, and even that frequent states of curiosity are psychologically necessary for a person's regular success in learning and discovery.1 That we take curiosity to be instrumental to and even essential for education, inquiry, and knowledge is confirmed by the fact that teachers often prefer techniques of instruction that excite curiosity - they juxtapose topics with unexpected connections to elicit surprise, ask students to solve puzzles, present vivid examples or make striking demonstrations to rivet attention on the subject matter, and use the Socratic method of instruction to cultivate an inclination to evocative questions. Stimulating curiosity is central to education and learning. We seek here to explain why curiosity has instrumental value for inquiry and knowledge.2 Our strategy will be to explore the nature of curiosity and employ what we discover about it to explain its instrumental epistemic value. Part of our explanation will turn on necessary features of curiosity - features recognized in our everyday concept of curiosity - and part will turn on contingent features of curiosity. Our explanation will parallel, in a contemporary idiom, John Dewey's explanation of the value of...