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Chapter 12 - Edgework

Viewing Curiosity as Fundamentally Relational

from Part III - Which Machinery Supports the Drive for Knowledge?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2022

Irene Cogliati Dezza
Affiliation:
University College London
Eric Schulz
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen
Charley M. Wu
Affiliation:
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany
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Summary

Most theories of curiosity emphasize the acquisition of information. Yet, recent advances from philosophy and cognitive science suggest that it may be time to complement the acquisitional theory of curiosity with a connectional theory of curiosity. This alternative perspective focuses on the actions of the knower in seeking relations among informational units, laying down lines of intersection, and thereby building a scaffold or network of knowledge. Intuitively, curiosity becomes edgework. In this chapter, we dwell on the notion of edgework, wrestle with its relation to prior accounts, and exercise its unique features to craft alternative reasons for curiosity’s value to humanity. In doing so, we find that the notion of edgework offers a fresh, flexible, and explanatory account of curiosity. More broadly, it uncovers new opportunities to use the lens of science to examine, probe, and interrogate this important dimension of the human experience.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Drive for Knowledge
The Science of Human Information Seeking
, pp. 259 - 278
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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