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Inquiry
Edited by Joshua Habgood-Coote (University of Leeds)
About this topic
| Summary | Inquiry is a central topic in philosophy, with a history running from Plato's dialogues and Pyrrhonian scepticism to American Pragmatism, but it has largely been overlooked as a topic in epistemology in favour of knowledge, belief, and justification. To understand inquiry, we need to negotiate issues at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. We inquire into questions, so we need to understand what questions and answers are, and what it takes to resolve a question. Inquiry is a goal-directed activity, so we need to understand what the goals of inquiry might be (knowledge, true belief, understanding), and what the norms of inquiry are. There are also important questions about the relation between inquiry, curiosity and wonder, and between inquiry, belief, and the suspension of judgement . Although we can inquire alone, we typically try to answer questions together, so we need to understand the inquisitive character of conversation, as well as larger-scale collaborative inquiry, in science, philosophy, and democratic discourse. |
| Key works | There is a recent surge of interest in inquiry within epistemology. Some notable topics include: the content of inquiry Friedman 2013, the relation between inquiry, belief, and suspension of judgement Friedman 2013, Friedman 2017 , what the goal of inquiry might be Peirce 1877, Pritchard 2008, Kelp 2014 whether inquiry has a constitutive norm Whitcomb 2017, the nature of collective inquiry Habgood-Coote 2022, and how the norms associated with inquiry relate to other epistemic norms Friedman 2020, Fleisher 2021. On conversation as collective inquiry, see Stalnaker 1984 and Roberts 1996. On Pyrrhonianism and inquiry, see Perin 2006, and on Peirce, see . |
| Introductions | For an accessible introduction to the semantics of questions, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/questions/ |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Belief (2,133 | 1,163)
- The Basing Relation (108)
- Defeat (185)
- Entitlement (101)
- Epistemic Possibility (131)
- Epistemic Luck (246)
- Evidence (957 | 124)
- Ignorance (222)
- Justification (1,202 | 713)
- Knowledge (5,058 | 743)
- Rationality (2,783 | 2,090)
- Reasons (2,929 | 324)
- Subjectivity and Objectivity (189 | 27)
- Thought and Thinking (517 | 266)
- Understanding (438)
- Warrant (173 | 71)
- Wisdom (392)
- Epistemological States and Properties, Misc (86)
See also
- Questions (522)
- Social Epistemology (7,238 | 3,195)
- American Pragmatism (3,620 | 3,064)
- Belief (2,133 | 1,163)
- Pyrrhonian Skepticism (315)
Contents
185 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 185 |
- New Boundary Lines.Alejandro Pérez Carballo - manuscriptIntellectual progress involves forming a more accurate picture of the world. But it also figuring out which concepts to use for theorizing about the world. Bayesian epistemology has had much to say about the former aspect of our cognitive lives, but little if at all about the latter. I outline a framework for formulating questions about conceptual change in a broadly Bayesian framework. By enriching the resources of Epistemic Utility Theory with a more expansive conception of epistemic value, I offer (...)
- Taking a Good look at the norms of gathering and responding to evidence.Richard Pettigrew - manuscriptIn the recent philosophical literature on inquiry, epistemologists point out that their subject has often begun at the point at which you already have your evidence and then focussed on identifying the beliefs for which that evidence provides justification. But we are not mere passive recipients of evidence. While some comes to us unbidden, we often actively collect it. This has long been recognised, but typically epistemologists have taken the norms that govern inquiry to be practical, not epistemic. The recent (...)
- Suspension in Inquiry.Julia Staffel - manuscriptWhen we’re inquiring to find out whether p is true, knowing that we’ll get better evidence in the future seems like a good reason to suspend judgment about p now. But, as Matt McGrath has recently argued, this natural thought is in deep tension with traditional accounts of justification. On traditional views of justification, which doxastic attitude you are justified in having now depends on your current evidence, not on what you might learn later. McGrath proposes to resolve this tension (...)
- Inquiry and Metaphysical Rationalism.Fatema Amijee - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1-15.According to an important version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, every fact has a metaphysical explanation, where a metaphysical explanation of some fact tells us what makes it the case that the fact obtains. I argue that so long as we have not yet discovered that any fact is brute, we ought to be committed to this version of the principle—henceforth ‘the PSR’—because it is indispensable to a species of inquiry we ought to engage in. I argue first that (...)
- Epistemic Value, Duty, and Virtue.Guy Axtell - forthcoming - In Brian C. Barnett (ed.), Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology. Rebus Community.This chapter introduces some central issues in Epistemology, and, like others in the open textbook series Introduction to Philosophy, is set up for rewarding college classroom use, with discussion/reflection questions matched to clearly-stated learning objectives,, a brief glossary of the introduced/bolded terms/concepts, links to further open source readings as a next step, and a readily-accessible outline of the classic between William Clifford and William James over the "ethics of belief." The chapter introduces questions of epistemic value through Plato's famous example (...)
- “Do Your Own Research”.Nathan Ballantyne, Jared B. Celniker & David Dunning - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.This article evaluates an emerging element in popular debate and inquiry: DYOR. (Haven’t heard of the acronym? Then Do Your Own Research.) The slogan is flexible and versatile. It is used frequently on social media platforms about topics from medical science to financial investing to conspiracy theories. Using conceptual and empirical resources drawn from philosophy and psychology, we examine key questions about the slogan’s operation in human cognition and epistemic culture.
- Śrīharṣa on Two Paradoxes of Inquiry.Nilanjan Das - forthcoming - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.In A Confection of Refutation (Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya), the twelfth-century philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa addresses a version of Meno’s paradox. This version of the paradox was well known in first millennium South Asia through the writings of two earlier Sanskrit philosophers, Śabarasvāmin (4th–5th century ce) and Śaṃkara (8th century ce). Both these thinkers proposed a solution to the paradox. I show how Śrīharṣa rejects this solution, and splits the old paradox into two new ones: the paradox of triviality and the paradox of (...)
- Who knows what? Epistemic dependence, inquiry, and function-first epistemology.Joshua DiPaolo - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Function-first epistemologists analyze epistemic concepts, norms, and practices by investigating their functions. According to the most prominent function-first account, the primary function of our concept of knowledge is identifying reliable informants. In this paper, I take for granted the function-first methodology to achieve three main goals: First, I argue against this prominent account: studying practices of knowledge attribution and denial related to epistemic dependence, coordination, and competition reveals that the primary function of our concept of knowledge is not identifying reliable (...)
- Zetetic Epistemology.Jane Friedman - forthcoming - In Towards an Expansive Epistemology: Norms, Action, and the Social Sphere. Routledge.In this paper I explore the contours of a picture of normative epistemology that speaks centrally to the question of how to inquire rather than just the question of what to believe. What if normative epistemology were expanded to encompass inquiry in full? I argue that while a 'zetetic epistemology' builds on traditional normative epistemology in many appealing ways, it also faces some challenges.
- The Aim of Inquiry?Jane Friedman - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
- Curious to Know.Eliran Haziza - forthcoming - Episteme:1-15.What is curiosity? An attractive option is that it is a desire to know. This analysis has been recently challenged by what I call interrogativism, the view that inquiring attitudes such as curiosity have questions rather than propositions as contents. In this paper, I defend the desire-to-know view, and make three contributions to the debate. First, I refine the view in a way that avoids the problems of its simplest version. Second, I present a new argument for the desire-to-know view (...)
- Norms of Inquiry.Eliran Haziza - forthcoming - Philosophy Compass.This article provides an overview of recent work on norms of inquiry. After some preliminaries about inquiry in §1, I discuss in §2 the ignorance norm for inquiry, presenting arguments for and against, as well as some alternatives. In §3, I consider its relation to the aim of inquiry. In §4, I discuss positive norms on inquiry: norms that require having rather than lacking certain states. Finally, in §5, I look at questions about the place of norms of inquiry within (...)
- Belief and Settledness.Wooram Lee - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.This paper elucidates the sense in which belief is a question-settling attitude. In her recent work, Jane Friedman suggests that we understand the settledness of belief in terms of a normative principle about belief and inquiry: one ought not inquire into a question and believe the answer to the question at the same time. On the basis of the distinction between dispositional and occurrent belief, I argue against Friedman that there is no principle linking belief and inquiry that is both (...)
- Rational Aversion to Information.Sven Neth - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1966) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and relevant. But Good's argument presupposes that you are certain you will update by conditionalization. If we relax this assumption and allow agents to be uncertain about updating, these agents can be rationally required to reject free and relevant information. Since there are good reasons (...)
- Higher-Order Evidence and the Duty To Double-Check.Michele Palmira - forthcoming - Noûs.The paper proposes an account of the rational response to higher-order evidence whose key claim is that whenever we acquire such evidence we ought to engage in the inquiring activity of double-checking. Combined with a principle that establishes a connection between rational inquiry and rational belief retention, the account offers a novel explanation of the alleged impermissibility of retaining one’s belief in the face of higher-order evidence. It is argued that this explanation is superior to the main competitor view which (...)
- Kierkegaard on Belief and Credence.Z. Quanbeck - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky “venture” that requires “holding fast” to “objective uncertainty.” Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world “exclude doubt” and “nullify uncertainty,” but also that uncertainty is “continually present” in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief-credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that (...)
- Making Sense of Things: Moral Inquiry as Hermeneutical Inquiry.Paulina Sliwa - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.We are frequently confronted with moral situations that are unsettling, confusing, disorienting. We try to come to grips with them. When we do so, we engage in a distinctive type of moral inquiry: hermeneutical inquiry. Its aim is to make sense of our situation. What is it to make sense of one's situation? Hermeneutical inquiry is part of our everyday moral experience. Understanding its nature and its place in moral epistemology is important. Yet, I argue, that existing accounts of moral (...)
- An Instrumentalist Unification of Zetetic and Epistemic Reasons.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...)
- Curiosity and Zetetic Style in ADHD.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Somogy Varga - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulate curiosity in response to the cognitive and practical costs associated (...)
- A Puzzle about Guessing and Inquiry.Richard Teague - forthcoming - Analysis.This paper presents a puzzle in the form of a tension between two things: (1) data points about what intuitively count as good guesses to a question given an agent's subjective probabilities, and (2) plausible strategic norms of inquiry that tell us how to go about answering a question. Recent theories of guessing and good guessing have acknowledged this puzzle in one form or another, and they aim to get around it by appealing to some sort of contextualism. But I (...)
- Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?David Thorstad - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context-sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language. In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My third aim is to (...)
- General-Purpose Institutional Decision-Making Heuristics: The Case of Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty.David Thorstad - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.Recent work in judgment and decisionmaking has stressed that institutions, like individuals, often rely on decisionmaking heuristics. But most of the institutional decisionmaking heuristics studied to date are highly firm- and industry-specific. This contrasts to the individual case, in which many heuristics are general-purpose rules suitable for a wide range of decision problems. Are there also general-purpose heuristics for institutional decisionmaking? In this paper, I argue that a number of methods recently developed for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty have a good (...)
- The accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition.David Thorstad - forthcoming - British Journal for Philosophy of Science.I argue that bounded agents face a systematic accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition. Agents must choose whether to structure their cognition in ways likely to promote coherence or accuracy. I illustrate the accuracy-coherence tradeoff by showing how it arises out of at least two component tradeoffs: a coherence-complexity tradeoff between coherence and cognitive complexity, and a coherence-variety tradeoff between coherence and strategic variety. These tradeoffs give rise to an accuracy-coherence tradeoff because privileging coherence over complexity or strategic variety often leads to (...)
- Enquiry and the Value of Knowledge.Barnaby Walker - forthcoming - Philosophy.In this paper I challenge the orthodox view of the significance of Platonic value problems. According to this view, such problems are among the central questions of epistemology, and answering them is essential for justifying the status of epistemology as a major branch of philosophical enquiry. I challenge this view by identifying an assumption on which Platonic value problems are based – the value assumption – and considering how this assumption might be resisted. After articulating a line of thought that (...)
- Bullshit Questions.Dennis Whitcomb - forthcoming - Analysis.This paper argues that questions can be bullshit. First it explores some shallowly interrogative ways in which that can happen. Then it shows how questions can also be bullshit in a way that’s more deeply interrogative.
- Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion.Dennis Whitcomb & Jared Millson - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-23.A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might *prohibit* having certain inquiring attitudes (``norms of restriction''), while ignoring those that might *require* having them (``norms of expansion''). We aim to address that omission by offering a framework that generates norms of expansion for inquiring attitudes. (...)
- The Knowledge Norm for Inquiry.Christopher Willard-Kyle - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one shouldn’t inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one shouldn’t inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there’s an answer in (...)
- Why Double-Check?Elise Woodard - forthcoming - Episteme:1-24.Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, (...)
- The Value of Biased Information.Nilanjan Das - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):25-55.In this article, I cast doubt on an apparent truism, namely, that if evidence is available for gathering and use at a negligible cost, then it’s always instrumentally rational for us to gather that evidence and use it for making decisions. Call this ‘value of information’ (VOI). I show that VOI conflicts with two other plausible theses. The first is the view that an agent’s evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. The second is the view that epistemic (...)
- Inquiring Minds Want to Improve.Arianna Falbo - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2).Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...)
- Should epistemology take the zetetic turn?Arianna Falbo - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):2977-3002.What is the relationship between inquiry and epistemology? Are epistemic norms the norms that guide us as inquirers—as agents in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding? Recently, there has been growing support for what I, following Friedman (Philosophical Review 129(4):501–536, 2020), will call the zetetic turn in epistemology, the view that all epistemic norms are norms of inquiry. This paper investigates the prospects of an inquiry-centered approach to epistemology and develops several motivations for resisting it. First, I argue that the (...)
- Intellectual courage and inquisitive reasons.Will Fleisher - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (4):1343-1371.Intellectual courage requires acting to promote epistemic goods despite significant risk of harm. Courage is distinguished from recklessness and cowardice because the expected epistemic benefit of a courageous action outweighs (in some sense) the threatened harm. Sometimes, however, inquirers pursue theories that are not best supported by their current evidence. For these inquirers, the expected epistemic benefit of their actions cannot be explained by appeal to their evidence alone. The probability of pursuing the true theory cannot contribute enough to the (...)
- Responsibility for Collective Epistemic Harms.Will Fleisher & Dunja Šešelja - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):1-20.Discussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the collective action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks' (2019) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic (...)
- Epistemic style in OCD.Carolina Flores - 2023 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 30 (2):147-150.Commentary on Pablo Hubacher Haerle’s paper “Is OCD Epistemically Irrational?”. I argue for expanding our assessment of rationality in OCD by considering a wider range of epistemic parameters and how they fit together.
- Agent-centered epistemic rationality.James Gillespie - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-22.It is a plausible and compelling theoretical assumption that epistemic rationality is just a matter of having doxastic attitudes that are the correct responses to one’s epistemic reasons, or that all requirements of epistemic rationality reduce to requirements on doxastic attitudes. According to this idea, all instances of epistemic rationality are instances of rational belief. Call this assumption, and any theory working under it, _belief-centered_. In what follows, I argue that we should not accept belief-centered theories of epistemic rationality. This (...)
- Questioning and addressee knowledge.Eliran Haziza - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-23.There are norms for asking questions. Inquirers should not ask questions to which they know the answer. The literature on the norms of asking has focused on such speaker-centered norms. But, as I argue, there are addressee-centered norms as well: inquirers should not ask addressees who fall short of a certain epistemic status. That epistemic status, I argue here, is knowledge.
- Framed and framing inquiry: a pragmatist proposal.Céline Henne - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-25.In this article, I draw an important distinction between two kinds of inquiry. “Framed inquiries” take for granted and use a conceptual framework in order to ask and answer questions, while “framing inquiries” require the creation, revision, or expansion of the conceptual framework itself in order to address the problem at hand. This distinction has been largely ignored in epistemology, and collapsed by two radically opposed philosophical camps: representationalism and antirepresentationalism. While the former takes all inquiries to be in the (...)
- Resolutions Against Uniqueness.Kenji Lota & Ulf Hlobil - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1013–1033.The paper presents a new argument for epistemic permissivism. The version of permissivism that we defend is a moderate version that applies only to explicit doxastic attitudes. Drawing on Yalcin’s framework for modeling such attitudes, we argue that two fully rational subjects who share all their evidence, prior beliefs, and epistemic standards may still differ in the explicit doxastic attitudes that they adopt. This can happen because two such subjects may be sensitive to different questions. Thus, differing intellectual interests can (...)
- Replies to the Critics of Knowing and Checking: an Epistemological Investigation.Guido Melchior - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):95-131.This paper replies to the comments made in Acta Analytica by Peter Baumann, Kelly Becker, Marian David, Nenad Miščević, Wes Siscoe, and Danilo Šuster on my Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation (Routledge 2019), hereinafter abbreviated as KC. These papers resulted from a workshop organized by the department of philosophy of the University of Maribor. I am very thankful to the organizers of the workshop and to the authors for their comments.
- Conceptual limitations, puzzlement, and epistemic dilemmas.Deigan Michael - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2771-2796.Conceptual limitations restrict our epistemic options. One cannot believe, disbelieve, or doubt what one cannot grasp. I show how, even granting an epistemic ought-implies-can principle, such restrictions might lead to epistemic dilemmas: situations where each of one’s options violates some epistemic requirement. An alternative reaction would be to take epistemic norms to be sensitive to one’s options in ways that ensure dilemmas never arise. I propose, on behalf of the dilemmist, that we treat puzzlement as a kind of epistemic residue, (...)
- Belief, blame, and inquiry: a defense of doxastic wronging.Z. Quanbeck - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):2955-2975.According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, our beliefs can non-derivatively wrong others. A recent criticism of this view claims that proponents of the doxastic wronging thesis have no principled grounds for denying that credences can likewise non-derivatively wrong, so they must countenance pervasive conflicts between morality and epistemic rationality. This paper defends the thesis of doxastic wronging from this objection by arguing that belief bears distinctive relationships to inquiry and blame that can explain why beliefs, but not credences, can (...)
- Having a Hunch.Howard Sankey - 2023 - Logos and Episteme 14 (2):215-219.It has recently been argued that when one conducts an inquiry into some question one ought to suspend belief with respect to that question. But what about hunches? In this short note, a hunch about the cause of a phenomenon is described. The hunch plays a role in the inquiry into the cause of the phenomenon. It appears that the hunch constitutes a belief that need not be suspended during the inquiry even though belief about the precise cause of the (...)
- That’s Not Double Checking, or “There’s only a Problem if You Make One”.Nicholas Smith - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):1923-1931.
- Valuable Ignorance: Delayed Epistemic Gratification.Christopher Willard-Kyle - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):363–84.A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...)
- In Defense of Clutter.Brendan Balcerak Jackson, DiDomenico David & Kenji Lota - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities". Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it. This is significant because the principle appears to have robust implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman (2018) has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision. In this paper, we present some new objections to a suitably (...)
- Suspending Judgment is Something You Do.Lindsay Crawford - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):561-577.What is it to suspend judgment about whether p? Much of the recent work on the nature and normative profile of suspending judgment aims to analyze it as a kind of doxastic attitude. On some of these accounts, suspending judgment about whether p partly consists in taking up a certain higher-order belief about one's deficient epistemic position with respect to whether p. On others, suspending judgment about whether p consists in taking up a sui generis attitude, one that takes the (...)
- The Varieties of Agnosticism.Filippo Ferrari & Luca Incurvati - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):365-380.We provide a framework for understanding agnosticism. The framework accounts for the varieties of agnosticism while vindicating the unity of the phenomenon. This combination of unity and plurality is achieved by taking the varieties of agnosticism to be represented by several agnostic stances, all of which share a common core provided by what we call the minimal agnostic attitude. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the framework by showing how it can be applied to several philosophical debates. In particular, several philosophical (...)
- Question-driven stepwise experimental discoveries in biochemistry: two case studies.Michael Fry - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (2):1-52.Philosophers of science diverge on the question what drives the growth of scientific knowledge. Most of the twentieth century was dominated by the notion that theories propel that growth whereas experiments play secondary roles of operating within the theoretical framework or testing theoretical predictions. New experimentalism, a school of thought pioneered by Ian Hacking in the early 1980s, challenged this view by arguing that theory-free exploratory experimentation may in many cases effectively probe nature and potentially spawn higher evidence-based theories. Because (...)
- Thinking and being sure.Jeremy Goodman & Ben Holguín - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):634-654.How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...)
- Group Inquiry.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1099-1123.Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing accounts of group (...)
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