Groundwork for the Ontology of Curiosity

Curiosity is increasingly recognized as vital to healthy aging, but the potential for leveraging research on curiosity to promote healthy aging is undermined by definitional inconsistencies and ambiguities in the literature—an issue that ontologies are uniquely well positioned to resolve. This paper proposes an ontological framework for modeling curiosity that addresses major shortcomings in existing definitions. Drawing on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), I define curiosity emotion process in terms of an appraisal of search-worthiness and an exploratory action tendency. I also define a related curiosity disposition. My approach enables clear distinctions among subtypes of both kinds of curiosity. The result is a more flexible, rigorous model of the various phenomena described as “curiosity” that aligns with empirical findings.