Curious about what though? It seems like a very important piece of the above lesson is missing if we have no guidance as to what we should be curious about. It does me no good, perhaps no small amount of harm, to be intensely curious about the details of a fictional world. I ought not be curious about the personal life of my neighbor. And while curiosity about insects may serve some, it’s unlikely to do most people any good at all. I think we have no good reason to believe that we’re generally curious about the right sorts of things.
And there seems to be a deeper problem here too. Some things about which we’re curious might just not be very knowable. I can study ancient history all I like, but there’s just a limit to what we can know about what caused Peloponnesian war, not just because of the temporal distance or lack of record, but because there’s just a lot of fundamental incoherence to things like that. History, to take one example, just isn’t that knowable. Curiosity about history can be rewarded, but only a very restrained curiosity.
I think this is where the idea that ‘a burning itch to know is better than a vow to pursue the truth’: I’ve felt that burning itch to know and I know from experience that it doesn’t of itself distinguish between worthy topics of curiosity and unworthy ones. A vow, at least, already has the idea of seriousness and purposefulness built into it.
Curious about what though? It seems like a very important piece of the above lesson is missing if we have no guidance as to what we should be curious about. It does me no good, perhaps no small amount of harm, to be intensely curious about the details of a fictional world. I ought not be curious about the personal life of my neighbor. And while curiosity about insects may serve some, it’s unlikely to do most people any good at all. I think we have no good reason to believe that we’re generally curious about the right sorts of things.
And there seems to be a deeper problem here too. Some things about which we’re curious might just not be very knowable. I can study ancient history all I like, but there’s just a limit to what we can know about what caused Peloponnesian war, not just because of the temporal distance or lack of record, but because there’s just a lot of fundamental incoherence to things like that. History, to take one example, just isn’t that knowable. Curiosity about history can be rewarded, but only a very restrained curiosity.
I think this is where the idea that ‘a burning itch to know is better than a vow to pursue the truth’: I’ve felt that burning itch to know and I know from experience that it doesn’t of itself distinguish between worthy topics of curiosity and unworthy ones. A vow, at least, already has the idea of seriousness and purposefulness built into it.