That's interesting!

Published in December 1971 in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, this seminal work argues that great theorists are considered great not because their theories are true, but because they are interesting.

Davis systematically analyzes what makes a theory interesting by examining famous social and sociological theories, demonstrating that interesting propositions fundamentally challenge and negate the taken-for-granted assumptions of their audience.

The article provides a comprehensive index of propositional forms that characterize interesting versus non-interesting theories, including dimensions such as organization, composition, abstraction, generalization, reversal, and function.