The role of values in curiosity: cognitive and epistemic issues

This paper examines the role of values in the emergence of curiosity, focusing on its so-called "chicken-egg problem": do we become curious because we already care about something, or do we start caring because we are curious about it? Drawing on an embodied and ecological perspective on cognition, as well as insights from Ignorance Studies, I analyze the affective and epistemic conditions under which curiosity arises. I defend two main claims: (1) curiosity emerges as an embodied response to the affordances of unfamiliar objects, which agents engage with because they already value them in some way; and (2) once curiosity arises, it reshapes how agents care for that content. To capture this dynamic, I propose a compound definition of curiosity as a bodily, emotional, and cognitive state, where caring guides curiosity and curiosity reveals caring.