Curiosity and Networks of Possibility

Scientific progress, then, is not unidirectional but multidirectional and its characteristic discoveries both add new information and reformulate old information. Scientific curiosity, in this context, drives individual scientists and scientific communities to fill internal and external network cavities with informational nodes and conceptual edges

Curiosity is a drive to acquire new information, or to gain new perspectives and new skills. It is through the acquisition of new information that new possibilities for the organism (and social organism) become activated. While that acquisitional (and novelty-centric) account has been useful over the years in studying curiosity from a variety of fi

Although science may proceed through the experimental pluck of one scientist or another, it is ultimately a collaborative endeavor. Similarly, speculative fiction is read by the singular reader but experienced by a fanbase and sometimes a whole culture (or cultures).

If curiosity can be a critical comportment toward the possible, then to fully understand possibility one must also understand curiosity

Sometimes, however, possibilities are quite old—longstanding and patient. And likewise, some curiosities are ancient—questions that have been either long-touted or long-buried. How might we dispel, then, the novelty bias to which curiosity and possibility are so regularly subject? How might we better appreciate curiosity and possibility wherever th

As a condition of innovation, Johnson (2010) argues, “the adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself” (p. 31)

If knowledge is a network and curiosity is its growth principle, and if the adjacent possible is indeed hovering over the edges of knowledge systems as they currently exist, then curiosity is at least one of, if not the primary, epistemic access point to that field of adjacent epistemic possibilities. Crucially, that field of adjacent epistemic pos

“experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads” (p. 12). Those silken lines are threaded and rethreaded, knotted and reknotted, to make and remake webs of sense.

Without curiosity, possibility cannot appear on the scene, and without possibility, curiosity has no scene to work with in the first place. The two make one another possible.