Curiosity and Similar Mental States
Aristotle famously began Metaphysics with the claim that human beings by nature desire to know. Let’s bracket cases of willful ignorance and other possible counterexamples and suppose that, generally speaking, the Stagirite is correct. We can call this desire for knowledge ‘curiosity.’ Thus our Aristotelian assumption is that all human beings, by nature, are curious.
Since knowledge is factive, truth is a necessary condition for knowledge. If Smith knows that p, then p is true. Hence, if humans are naturally curious, we innately want to obtain the truth, i.e., to form beliefs that correspond with the relevant facts.
Yet there is another human epistemic desire. It’s similar to curiosity, but significantly different. This is the search for coherent explanation. Note that one can attain a coherent explanation which is nevertheless false. If Smith has a coherent explanation for (p1, p2, … pn), it doesn’t follow that the explanation is true.[1] In short, explanation is not factive.
For some folks, the desire for coherent explanation - perhaps conjoined with a need for doxastic closure - appears stronger than the desire for knowledge. Some even seem unable to bear the state of lacking an account with respect to some topic. Such people seem driven by a motivation to avoid explanation-bereftness and hence might settle for dubious accounts to slake the urge for explanation and closure.
I wonder if this proclivity to explain might account for the human phenomena of myth-making and conspiracy theorizing, which are similar in that each involves the search for an appealing account. Such seeking generally is motivated by the natural aspiration to possess coherent beliefs, explanations, and meaning. But the search is often prioritized over truth and knowledge.
Coherence is an important epistemic goal. However, pace coherence theorists, coherence is not sufficient for truth. One can have a wholly consistent set of beliefs, each of which is false. Excellence in the epistemic life requires the formulation of beliefs which cohere with one another and correspond to the pertinent facts. At this point, myth-makers and conspiracy theorists might fall short. Such folks do the hard work of forming a (more or less) consistent web of beliefs, and yet might never seek sufficient evidence to confirm or disconfirm whether or not the beliefs are true, but instead rest comfortably in the false conviction that they have met the goal of epistemic mastery. Indeed, conspiracy theorists and ideological dogmatists are known to formulate slippery positions conveniently designed to avoid disconfirmation, engage in confirmation bias, make ad hoc appeals, and the like.
Aristotle rightly said elsewhere that human beings are rational animals. As I see it, our rationality involves the search for both meaning and knowledge. We are thus meaning-seeking and truth-seeking animals. If so, why not aspire to mastery in these respects?
[1] Think, for example, of ancient myths. Many of these provided a coherent explanation of some phenomena and, nonetheless, were likely false. I am using 'coherent' in the sense of being logically consistent.