The Interrogative Model of Inquiry and Dynamic Epistemic Logics are two central paradigms in formal epistemology. This paper is motivated by the observation of a significant complementarity between them: on the one hand, the IMI provides a framework for investigating inquiry represented as an idealized game between an Inquirer and Nature, along with an account of the interaction between questions and inferences in information-seeking processes, but is lacking a formulation in the multi-agent case; on the other (...) hand, DELs model various operations of information change in multi-agent systems, but the field is lacking a proper integration of question and inference dynamics, along with an application to the investigation of inquiry processes. The goal of this paper is to integrate the two paradigms in such a way as to combine their respective insights. To this end, we develop a formal system called DEL $$_\mathrm{IMI }$$ IMI which aims to represent the interaction between question and inference dynamics in inquiry—as described by the IMI—in a multi-agent setting, and this in such a way as to enable an investigation of inquiry games with multi-agent dimensions. The DEL $$_\mathrm{IMI }$$ IMI system is designed to represent the possible moves of such inquiry games through three types of epistemic actions: agents addressing questions to Nature, agents addressing questions to other agents, agents drawing logical inferences. We then show how the resulting framework can be used to formally define multi-agent inquiry games. We conclude by evaluating the interest of the DEL $$_\mathrm{IMI }$$ IMI system for the IMI and DELs paradigms. (shrink)

The article outlines the prospects of using J. Hintikka’s interrogative epistemology for modelling cognitive operations carried out by a cognizing agent to create a machine capable of full cognition. It was established that modeling is divided into two objectives: modeling the cognitive operations and modeling the strategic reasoning. Interrogative epistemology presents a solution to the first objective. It relies on a game-theoretic formal apparatus that allows one to correctly describe all types of possible moves within the framework of (...) a particular cognitive game. The second objective cannot be accomplished in a general epistemological theory framework since strategic considerations about the organization of research and even the concept of knowledge inevitably depend on the broader context of an agent’s practical activity. Therefore, interrogative epistemology does not claim a universal and complete description of the process of cognition, focusing on other tasks: primarily on identifying hidden premises that cognitive agents use in their reasoning. For the same reason, interrogative epistemology deems the possibility of the existence of a cognizing machine as formally unsubstantiated and questionable. However, arguments are given in favor of the fact that interrogative epistemology serves as an acceptable conceptual framework for clarifying the nature of the difficulties that arise with attempts to accomplish the second objective and improving the quality of philosophical discourse in the field of artificial intelligence research. The author substantiates this position by arguing that the ability to cognize presupposes the ability to perform all the essential functions that are usually called mental. (shrink)

Book Reviews: Can Başkent, Perspectives on Interrogative Models of Inquiry, Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, Volume 8, Springer, 2016, vii + 197 pages, ISBN: 978-3-319-20761-2, 978-3-319-20762-9. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20762-9.

This article commends Jaakko Hintikka's interrogative model of reasoning as an aid to historiography in relation to historical inquiry and explanation. After an initial discussion of David Hackett Fischer's appeal to the "logic of historical thought" in terms of his overlapping complementary emphases with Hintikka's interrogative model, a critical evaluation is given of Fischer's brief but strong comments regarding the role of why-questions in historical explanation. From there the main part of the article is given (...) over to how the interrogative model provides an account of the nature of explanation in general using Hintikka's recently published work on explanation theory. The theory of explanation that uses the interrogative model is applied to historical explanation and illustrated in the way the interrogative model serves a descriptively-valuable role in historiography by reference to historical inquiry and explanation in Herodotus. (shrink)

The relationship between discovery and justification is not clear. According to a standard twentieth-century opinion, in the philosophy of science these two are understood as separate problems: how to recognize and conceptualize the object of study and how to find the justification for the conceptualized belief. How to study the logic of discovery? What kind of logic might such a logic be? The basic observation is that discoveries do not take place in a vacuum. They have to be localized into (...) scientific inquiry processes: a discovery is a discovery only in the context of a scientific inquiry process. To do this we use a systematic logico-philosophical model called the interrogative model of inquiry, which was developed by Jaakko Hintikka. The interrogative model of inquiry allows us to consider the scientific inquiry process as a strategic, goal-tracking process which gives justification for the discovery. The model allows us to formulate a systematic logic of scientific discovery and justification. (shrink)

We propose a dynamic-epistemic analysis of the different epistemic operations constitutive of the process of interrogative inquiry, as described by Hintikka’s Interrogative Model of Inquiry (IMI). We develop a dynamic logic of questions for representing interrogative steps, based on Hintikka’s treatment of questions in the IMI, along with a dynamic logic of inferences for representing deductive steps, based on the tableau method. We then merge these two systems into a dynamic logic of interrogative (...) inquiry which articulates a joint treatment of questions and inferences, providing thereby a unified framework representing the informational dynamics of interrogative inquiry. We provide sound and complete axiomatic systems for the three dynamic logics that we introduce, we compare our framework with existing approaches, and we finally propose several directions for further work. (shrink)

This paper examines critically the reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ proposed jointly by M.B. Hintikka and J. Hintikka in the 1980s, and its successor, the interrogative model of inquiry developed by J. Hintikka and his collaborators in the 1990s. The Hintikkas’ model explicitly used game theory in order to formalize a naturalistic approach to inquiry, but the imi abandoned both the game-theoretic formalism, and the naturalistic approach. It is argued that the latter (...) better supports the claim that the imi provides a ‘logic of discovery’, and safeguards its empirical adequacy. Technical changes necessary to this interpretation are presented, and examples are discussed, both formal and informal, that are better analyzed when these changes are in place. The informal examples are borrowed from Conan Doyle’s The Case of Silver Blaze, a favorite of M.B. and J. Hintikka. (shrink)

Conversation is one of the main contexts in which we are conducting inquiries. Yet, little attention has been paid so far in pragmatics or epistemology to the process of inquiry in conversation. In this paper, we propose to trigger such an investigation through the development of a formal modelling based on inquisitive pragmatics—a framework offering a semantic representation of questions and answers, along with an analysis of the pragmatic principles that govern questioning and answering moves in conversations geared towards (...) information exchange. Our starting observation is that an interrogative inquiry in a conversation takes the form of a finite sequence of questioning and answering steps, and appears thereby as an inherently temporal process. The central notion of interrogative protocol introduced in this paper precisely aims to capture the temporal dimension of inquiry. Interrogative protocols are defined as branching-time tree structures encoding all the possible sequences of questioning and answering steps—i.e., all the possible inquiry paths—that can subsequently occur in a starting conversational situation in accordance with the principles of inquisitive pragmatics. They provide us with a formal environment to define and investigate the epistemological notions of interrogative inquiry and interrogative consequence in conversational contexts. One of the main interests of the resulting framework is to enable a formal investigation of central epistemological issues relative to interrogative inquiry under the form of computational problems. We frame three key inquiry problems along this line, and we then propose an algorithmic procedure for solving them in the restricted case where the inquirer has at her disposal a finite number of questions in her inquiry. We conclude by relating our approach to Wiśniewski’s Erotetic Search Scenarios and Hintikka’s Interrogative Model of Inquiry. (shrink)

In Jaakko Hintikka's interrogative model of inquiry, the strategic principles governing empirical inquiry turn out to be closely related to those governing deductive reasoning. Hence it is important to study the precise analogies which obtain between deductive logic and interrogative inquiry. The basic concept of the interrogative model is the relation of model consequence $\text{M}\colon \text{T}\vdash \text{C}$. It is said to obtain iff C can be derived from T by means of (...) an interrogative process in the model M. We prove here a counterpart of Craig 's interpolation theorem for the concept of model consequence. The interrogative analogue to definability is a logical generalization of methodologists' concept of identifiability. For this concept, we prove an analogue to Beth's theorem. Some further philosophical consequences of these results are mentioned. For instance, identifiability is a good rational reconstruction of the idea of observability. (shrink)

In earlier publications Jaakko Hintikka has introduced the interrogative model of inquiry and studied some of its applications.1 At its simplest, the interrogative model takes the form of a game between a player known as the Inquirer and a source of information we call Nature. The inquirer is trying to derive a conclusion C from a given set of premises T by standard deductive means augmented by additional information gained from Nature. (We can think of (...) C as a set of formulas related disjunctively to each other.) The inquirer may obtain this additional information by means of questions put to Nature. The answers to these questions, when available, are then added to the premise set T. When a question is answerable but no true answer is available, Nature may respond with a false answer.The deductive steps employed are subject to certain limitations. For instance, if the derivation is being carried out in a Beth-style tableau system, we require that the deductive steps obey the subformula principle.2. (shrink)

The estrangement between genetic scientists and theologians originating in the 1960s is reflected in novel combinations of human thought (subject) and genes (investigational object), paralleling each other through the universal process known in chaos theory as self-similarity. The clash and recombination of genes and knowledge captures what Philip Hefner refers to as irony, one of four voices he suggests transmit the knowledge and arguments of the religion-and-science debate. When viewed along a tangent connecting irony to leadership, journal dissemination, and the (...) activities of the "public intellectual" and the public at large, the sequence of voices is shown to resemble the passage of genetic information from DNA to mRNA, tRNA, and protein, and from cell nucleus to surrounding environment. In this light, Hefner's inquiry into the voices of Zygon is bound up with the very subject matter Zygon covers. (shrink)

This article presents an archaeological inquiry into the early histories of Quality of Life measures, and takes this as an occasion to rethink the concept of the ‘medical model of disability’. Focusing on three instruments that set the ground for the emergence of QoL measures, namely, the Karnofsky Performance Scale, and the classification of functional capacity as a diagnostic criterion for heart diseases and as a supplementary aid to therapeutic criteria in rheumatoid arthritis – I discuss how medicine, (...) throughout the emergence of QoL, began to expand its gaze beyond the confines of the body to what that body does in daily life. Building upon Armstrong et al.’s notion of ‘distal symptoms’ and Wahlberg’s idea of ‘knowledge of living’, I propose the notion of disabilitization to encapsulate this expansion of the clinical gaze, through which medicine has come to articulate diseases and their treatments in new ways, and in so doing, has inadvertently created disability as a new kind of knowledge category in itself – a category that is defined not through its reduction to mere pathology, but through its dispersal into everyday life. I present this concept not as a periodization, but as a provocative discontinuity with the totalizing history assumed within the medical model of disability, and in so doing, ask what, in fact, holds ‘the medical model’ together, and whether there might be other ways of understanding medicine’s complex relationship to disability than what the concept of the medical model allows us to envisage. (shrink)

Erik J. Olsson and David Westlund have recently argued that the standard belief revision representation of an epistemic state is defective. In order to adequately model an epistemic state one needs, in addition to a belief set K and an entrenchment relation E, a research agenda A, i.e. a set of questions satisfying certain corpus-relative preconditions the agent would like to have answers to. Informally, the preconditions guarantee that the set of potential answers represent a partition of possible expansions (...) of K, hence are equivalent to well-behaved sets of alternative hypotheses. (shrink)

Contents: Matti SINTONEN: From the Science of Logic to the Logic of Science. I: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES. Zev BECHLER: Hintikka on Plenitude in Aristotle. Marja-Liisa KAKKURI-KNUUTTILA: What Can the Sciences of Man Learn from Aristotle? Martin KUSCH: Theories of Questions in German-Speaking Philosophy Around the Turn of the Century. Nils-Eric SAHLIN: 'HE IS NO GOOD FOR MY WORK': On the Philosophical Relations between Ramsey and Wittgenstein. II: FORMAL TOOLS: INDUCTION, OBSERVATION AND IDENTIFIABILITY. Theo A.F. KUIPERS: The Carnap-Hintikka Programme in Inductive Logic. (...) Isaac LEVI: Caution and Nonmonotonic Inference. Ilkka NIINILUOTO: Inductive Logic, Atomism, and Observational Error. Arto MUTANEN: Theory of Identifiability. III: QUESTIONS IN INQUIRY: THE INTERROGATIVE MODEL. Sylvain BROMBERGER: Natural Kinds and Questions. Scott A. KLEINER: The Structure of Inquiry in Developmental Biology. Andrzej WISNIEWSKI: Some Foundational Concepts of Erotetic Semantics. Jan WOLE??N??SKI: Science and Games. IV: GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE: EXPLANATION AND DISCOVERY. Matti SINTONEN: Explanation: The Fifth Decade. Erik WEBER: Scientific Explanation and the Interrogative Model of Inquiry. George GEBHARD: Scientific Discovery, Induction, and the Multi-Level Character of Scientific Inquiry. Mika KIIKERI: On the Logical Structure of Learning Models. V: JAAKKO HINTIKKA: REPLIES. VI: ABSTRACTS. (shrink)

Kuhn 's contribution should be viewed as posing a number of important problems, not as a full-fledged theory of the structure of science. Kuhn 's alleged theory-ladenness of observations is examined as a test case in the light of Hintikka's interrogative model of inquiry. A certain superficial theory-ladenness is built into that model. Moreover, the model provides a deeper analysis of theory-ladenness via the two-levelled character of experimental science. A higher-level and a lower-level inquiry (...) rely on different kinds of initial premises and operate with different kinds of "answers" by nature. The model also throws light on the alleged theory-ladenness of meaning. (shrink)

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some (...) cases, the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the find ings and the policy is easy to see. In other cases, perhaps most, its influence is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally the findings of social scientific studies are explicitly drawn upon by policymakers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, the categories and theoretical models of social science provide a general background orientation within which policymakers concep tualize problems and frame policy options. At times, the in fluence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policymakers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to le gitimate preestablished goals and strategies. Nonetheless, amid this diversity and variety, troubling general questions persistently arise. (shrink)

Several of the so-called “fallacies” in Aristotle are not in fact mistaken inference-types, but mistakes or breaches of rules in the questioning games which were practiced in the Academy and in the Lyceum. Hence the entire Aristotelian theory of “fallacies” ought to be studied by reference to the author's interrogative model of inquiry, based on his theory of questions and answers, rather than as a part of the theory of inference. Most of the “fallacies” mentioned by Aristotle (...) can in fact be diagnosed by means of the interrogative model, including petitio principii, multiple questions, “babbling’, etc., and so can Aristotle's alleged anticipation of the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. The entire Aristotelian conception of inquiry is an interrogative one. Deductive conclusions caught Aristotle's attention in the form of answers that every rational interlocutor must give, assuming only his own earlier answers. Several features of Aristotle's methodology can be understood by means of the interrogative model, including the role of endoxa in it. Theoretically, there is also considerable leeway as to whether “fallacies” are conceived of as mistakes in questioning or as breaches of the rules that govern questioning games. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Hintikka’s theory of interrogative approach to inquiry with a focus on bracketing. First, we dispute the use of bracketing in the interrogative model of inquiry arguing that bracketing provides an indispensable component of an inquiry. Then, we suggest a formal system based on strategy logic and logic of paradox to describe the epistemic aspects of an inquiry, and obtain a naturally paraconsistent system. We then apply our framework to (...) some cases to illustrate its use. (shrink)

Formal models of scientific inquiry, aimed at capturing socio-epistemic aspects underlying the process of scientific research, have become an important method in formal social epistemology and philosophy of science. In this introduction to the special issue we provide a historical overview of the development of formal models of this kind and analyze their methodological contributions to discussions in philosophy of science. In particular, we show that their significance consists in different forms of ‘methodological iteration’ whereby the models initiate new (...) lines of inquiry, isolate and clarify problems with existing knowledge claims, and stimulate further research. (shrink)

I. Levi has advocated a decision-theoretic account of belief revision. We argue that the game-theoretic framework of Interrogative Inquiry Games, proposed by J. Hintikka, can extend and clarify this account. We show that some strategic use of the game rules generate Expansions, Contractions and Revisions, and we give representation results. We then extend the framework to represent explicitly sources of answers, and apply it to discuss the Recovery Postulate. We conclude with some remarks about the potential extensions of (...) interrogative games, with respect to some issues in the theory of belief change. (shrink)

This study analyzes the ideals of responsibility and accountability, asking such questions as when it is legitimate to blame top officials of an organization for mistakes made by personnel below them in the bureaucratic hierarchy; when things go wrong in a large and complex organization like the Canadian Forces, who is responsible and accountable; and whether a plea of ignorance is a good excuse. The study also analyzes the doctrine of ministerial responsibility in both the British and Canadian parliamentary traditions, (...) asking whether it is realistic to expect that a government minister should be held responsible for everything that goes wrong in his/her department. Finally, traditional military values are examined, considering the kinds of attitudes and values expected from Canada's armed forces and the differences between the military and civilian sectors. (shrink)

In his book Knowledge and Belief, Jaakko Hintikka uses a model-theoretic approach of modal semantics as a theoretical basis for investigating the principles of epistemic logic. I shall first summarize the main points of Hintikka’s classic work and then address the most disputed themes raised by it in the 60s and later, such as logical omniscience and the KK-thesis, as well as Hintikka’s modifying his views on the basis of criticism. The last part of the book treats quantified epistemic (...) logic, particularly quantifying into “intensional” or “referentially opaque” epistemic contexts defended against Quine’s objections. I deal with this topic in Sect. 17.3 and add some relevant comparisons with John Buridan’s medieval approach in Sect. 17.4. A survey of Hintikka’s later theory of modelling knowledge acquisition is presented in Sect. 17.5; this includes the semantics of questions and inquiry in terms of game-theoretical semantics and their application to the logic of epistemology and scientific reasoning in the interrogative model of inquiry. Combining these results with the theory of independence friendly logic provides, Hintikka argues, a promising improvement of general epistemology which he calls a second-generation epistemic logic. The subject of the last section is “knowing who” in the sense of a basic epistemic attitude associated with identification which is the key notion in Hintikka’s epistemic theory of questions and answers, reference, and quantification. A central issue in this context is Hintikka’s discovery of the duality of cross-identification methods, the public or descriptive and the perspective ones. (shrink)

I will present a short overview of Hintikka’s main ideas in logic, starting with his early work on constituents and model sets, continuing with his contributions to epistemic logic, up to his later work in game-theoretical semantics and the Interrogative Model of Inquiry.

Alex has written an excellent thesis in the area of computable model theory. The latter is a subject that nicely combines model-theoretic ideas with delicate recursiontheoretic constructions. The results demand good knowledge of both fields. In his thesis, Alex begins by reviewing the essential model-theoretic facts, especially the Baldwin-Lachlan result about uncountably categorical theories. This he follows with a brief discussion of recursion theory, including mention of the priority method. The deepest part of the thesis concerns the (...) study of the recursive spectrum of an uncountably categorical theory, i.e. the set of n ≤ ! such that the n-th model of the theory (in the Baldwin-Lachlan sense) has a computable presentation. This is a deep and very active area of conteporary research in computable model theory which Alex discusses in considerable detail. The exposition is very good and therefore the thesis makes a nice introduction to the subject for a wide community of logicians. (Sy-David Friedman, Professor of Mathematical Logic, Director of the Kurt Godel Research Center for Mathematical Logic, University of Vienna). (shrink)

While open-mindedness as an intellectual trait has been recognized for centuries, Western philosophers have not explicitly endorsed it as a virtue until recently. This acknowledgment has been roughly coincident with the rise of virtue epistemology. As with any virtue, it is important to inform contemporary discussion of open-mindedness with reflection on sources from the history of philosophy. Here I do just this. After reviewing two major accounts of open-mindedness, which I dub "Contest" and "Indifference," I explore some ideas pertinent to (...) the subject in four philosophers spanning eighteen centuries: Sextus Empiricus, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Paul Feyerabend. Despite their varying concerns and terminology, their contributions may valuably inform current reflection on the virtue of open-mindedness, whether construed in terms of the Contest or Indifference account. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the epistemic value of highly idealized agent-based models of social aspects of scientific inquiry. On the one hand, we argue that taking the results of such simulations as informative of actual scientific inquiry is unwarranted, at least for the class of models proposed in recent literature. Moreover, we argue that a weaker approach, which takes these models as providing only “how-possibly” explanations, does not help to improve their epistemic value. On the other hand, (...) we suggest that if ABMs of science underwent two types of robustness analysis, they could indeed have a clear epistemic function, namely by providing evidence for philosophical and historical hypotheses. In this sense, ABMs can obtain evidential and explanatory properties and thus be a useful tool for integrated history and philosophy of science. We illustrate our point with an example of a model—building on the work by Kevin Zollman—which we apply to a concrete historical case study. (shrink)

The task of this article is to interrogate the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) model to develop a more robust understanding of a prominent trend in the charter school movement and education policy more generally. To accomplish this task, this article details the findings of a synthetic analysis that examines the KIPP model as a Hegelian whole concept operative in a specific mode of social reality. The guidance for this analysis is grounded in a rather straightforward research question. (...) Given the prominence that the KIPP model has achieved in the charter school movement in the United States, what can a synthetic analysis tell us about not only KIPP, but also the larger charter school movement? (shrink)

The notion of a community of inquiry has been treated by many of its proponents as being an exemplar of democracy in action. We argue that the assumptions underlying this view present some practical and theoretical difficulties, particularly in relation to distribution of power among the members of a community of inquiry. We identify two presuppositions in relation to distribution of power that require attention in developing an educational model that is committed to deliberative democracy: (1) openness (...) to inquiry and readiness to reason, and (2) mutual respect of students and teachers towards one another. Our contention is that these presuppositions, presented as preconditions necessary to the creation of a community of inquiry, are not without ideological commitments and dependent upon the ability of participants to share power. Using group dynamic theories and the ideas of Hannah Arendt, we argue that behaviours commonly interpreted as obstacles to dialogue or reflective inquiry could provide opportunities for growth. (shrink)

Criticism is a staple of the scientific enterprise and of the social epistemology of science. Philosophical discussions of criticism have traditionally focused on its roles in relation to objectivity, confirmation, and theory choice. However, attention to criticism and to criticizability should also inform our thinking about scientific pursuits: the allocation of resources with the aim of developing scientific tools and ideas. In this paper, we offer an account of scientific pursuitworthiness which takes criticizability as its starting point. We call this (...) the apokritic model of pursuit. Its core ideas are that pursuits are practices governed by norms for asking and answering questions, and that criticism arises from the breach of these norms. We illustrate and advertise our approach using examples from institutional grant review, neuroscience, and sociology. We show that the apokritic model can unify several indices of criticizability, that it can account for the importance of criticizing pursuits in scientific practice, and that it can offer ameliorative advice to erstwhile pursuers. (shrink)

Olsson and his collaborators have proposed an extension of Belief Revision Theory where an epistemic state is modeled as a triple S=⟨K_,E,A_⟩ , where A_ is a research agenda, i.e. a set of research questions. Contraction and expansion apply to states, and affect the agenda. We propose an alternative characterization of the problem of agenda updating, where research questions are viewed as blueprints for research strategies. We offer a unified solution to this problem, and prove it equivalent to Olsson’s own. (...) We conclude arguing that: (i) our solution makes the idea of ‘minimal change’ in questions and agendas clearer; (ii) can be extended in ways the original theory was not, and may help better realize the aims this theory was proposed for; (iii) unveils some limitations of the initial approach, yet opening a way to overcome them. (shrink)

This article reconstructs John Dewey's philosophy of the public by replacing its emphasis on scientific truth with an interpretive model of inquiry; it then shows how we can use this interpretive model of inquiry both to prevent collective harms and to expand the boundaries of our moral community.

This article discusses the conditions under which dialogical learner-researchers can move out of the philosophical laboratory of a community of philosophical inquiry into the field of social activism, engaging in a critical and creative examination of society and seeking to change it. Based on Matthew Lipman’s proposal that communities of philosophical inquiry can serve as a model of social activism in the present, it presents the community of philosophical inquiry as a model for social activism (...) in the future. In other words, Lipman’s central ideas in his earlier and later thought—including meaning as a mode of action, relevance as a way of examining life and stimulating influence for change as a form of creating a democratic society—establish two parallel circle of influence: the present time, in the shape of the philosophical community of inquiry that allows activist skills to be honed, and a social space that extends into the future as a forum for applying principles and bettering society. Finally, this paper adduces several forms of social activism that may be anchored in philosophical awareness of real conditions and their contexts. Through them, the community of philosophical inquiry not only constitutes a place in which young people’s thought processes can be developed but also one in which they can aspire to become activists in various areas. (shrink)