Curiosity and Networks of Possibility

Curiosity, we argue, is a capacity to connect—to build knowledge networks. Curiosity builds relationships between pieces of knowledge as much as between the people who want to know them. For this reason, we characterize curiosity as “edgework”—constantly laying down relationships between ideas, experiences, concepts, and objects in the world. Impor

Curiosity and possibility are typically subject to a novelty bias. People commonly conceptualize possibility as a harbinger of the new. What is old is already actualized; what is new is merely possible. Similarly, curiosity is thought, among scholars and lay people alike, to be piqued by and to produce the new. Repeatedly, across multiple fields an

Curiosity and possibility are sibling concepts, born of the same horizon and generated along the same edge. They work together to break open what has yet to be thought and done, lived and loved. We are poised at a moment in human history where these sibling concepts—long valued but understudied—are pressing to the fore of our consciousness and conc

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

In the process of construction and deconstruction, knowledge develops in immediately contiguous spaces—that is, along the adjacent possible edges, both inside and outside of a knowledge network structure. To think curiously, then, is to inaugurate that organic process of actualizing adjacent epistemic possibilities.

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

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.

“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.

While scientific progress, then, proceeds by curiously exploring adjacent possibilities, preference is given to work closely tied to existing science and conducted by a privileged subset of scientists.