Speaker Series: Dan Hoek (Virginia Tech) "The Interesting Question"

Abstract:  Alfred North Whitehead wrote that interestingness is more important than truth. Surely, he was onto something: when we find the true answer to a perfectly uninteresting question, nobody cares (or nobody should care). But what is interestingness? Why is it that some questions are interesting and others are not? Though philosophers have largely ignored these questions, I reckon they matter a great deal (in life as well as in philosophy). In this talk, I will raise some basic questions about the nature of the interesting, connect them to recent issues in the epistemology of inquiry and curiosity, and propose some tentative first steps towards a theory of interestingness.

Daniel Hoek has written on such varied topics as metaphor and loose talk, decision theory, infinity, and Newton. His forthcoming book, “The Inquisitive Mind,” explores the role that questions play in the way we think, the way we learn, the way we reason, and the way we act. He also has the same initials as David Hume!