This summer, David Price, a dual major in Philosophy and Chemistry, served as my research assistant for a project about curiosity and its relationship to knowledge. This project focused on the question of whether curiosity about the answer to some question properly terminates when the inquirer has gained knowledge of the answer to that question, or whether there might be cases in which continued inquiry is appropriate when one already knows the answer to the question one is curious about.
David writes: “I really enjoyed the research (reading) aspect of the project and learning about a subfield of philosophy (epistemology) that I had little prior knowledge of. Additionally, working with [Dr. Smith] on the integration of new material and revision of draft material was quite interesting and an awesome way to explore arguments and positions on the topic.” He also notes that he was surprised to find that philosophical research is more similar to chemistry research than he expected: “The project was more similar to research I had done in chemistry than I expected. Literature searches operate much the same, with the common goal to acquire sufficient evidence to elucidate a subject. In both also, there are aspects of the research that leaves questions unanswered, a mystery yet to be solved!”