Curiosity is often framed as openness or intellectual appetite. But what if curiosity plays a more structurally essential role in how we assign value?

In this interactive session, Hartman’s framework of formal axiology is used to reframe curiosity as: The disciplined suspension of premature valuation.

The session will illuminate how valuation operates under pressure, and how disciplined curiosity functions as a stabilizing force within that system.

Drawing from Hartman’s intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic hierarchy, participants will explore how bias emerges not simply as a cognitive shortcut, but as a distortion in valuation order, when certainty arrives too quickly and complexity is reduced before it is fully recognized.