This years winner of the Holberg Prize (established to increase awareness of the value of academic scholarship) – Ian Hacking – a Professor of Philosophy at U of T – wrote a very interesting article entitled Curious about Curiosity.
As humans, we are all innately curious but where does that curiosity stem from? In essence why does it serve only to perpetuate itself such that the discovery of one thing leads to questions about something else?
He sites an excerpt from a children’s book called Me! by William Saroyan – the premise being that in the beginning there was only one word “me”, and people went around saying “me me me” and nothing else until they discovered “you” and because there was now two, there could be more, and the people started finding out more.
Hacking then goes on to argue that we had to find out how to find out – in other words the emergence and expansion of curiosity has had the single biggest impact on the planet than anything else we have ever done! I concur.
In this day and age of exponential information growth the problem to me now seems to be how we manage this knowledge so that we continue to channel positivity from our curiosity.
A discouraging example would be the recent exposure of “suspect” emails about climate change from the University of East Anglia. While this likely stemmed from someone’s simple curiosity it has led to a Pandora’s Box like explosion of a media frenzy and has led some less informed members of the general public/political circle to doubt the FACT of global warming. Just because information is novel does not mean that it should automatically override years of well formulated facts.
In other words it is easy to be curious but what is not easily resolved is how we make use of the knowledge we garner from our curiosity. This is where I think it is important to have what Hacking’s terms “curiosity about curiosity itself”. In order to tackle this issue we must have a basic understanding of two things:
1)the cultural and sociological tools developed over time to use to assist in our discovery of ourselves and the world/phenomena around us
2) the nature of our curiosity, for good or for evil, for the individual or for the people?
Only then will we be able to perpetuate curiosity in a noble light.
See below for a copy of the original article by Ian Hacking:
P.S. I tried to find a copy of Me! on the internet but failed – I really would like to read the whole thing
