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Unzipping the zetetic turn

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Abstract

Zetetic norms govern our acts of inquiry. Epistemic norms govern our beliefs and acts of belief formation. Recently, Friedman (2020) has defended that we should think of these norms as conforming a single normative domain: epistemology should take a zetetic turn. Though this unification project implies a substantive re-elaboration of our traditional epistemic norms, Friedman argues that the reasons supporting the turn are robust enough to warrant its revisionary implications. In this paper, I suggest we should read Friedman’s proposal as a dilemma. Either we believe the zetetic turn is well-motivated and undertake the task of looking for the proper revision of our traditional epistemic norms, or we take the revisionary implications of the turn to be unacceptable, in which case our challenge is to show why a zetetic epistemology is not a well-motivated project after all. After presenting this dilemma, I make a case for endorsing its second horn by presenting a two-pronged argument against Friedman’s project. First, I show that the revisionary implications of the zetetic turn are more far-reaching than expected. Second, I defend that the most persuasive reasons for endorsing the turn are not strong enough to support it. Taken together, these considerations speak against accepting the zetetic turn and the revisionary implications that come with it.

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Notes

  1. To be more precise, epistemology would be concerned with the full range of our doxastic attitudes, which, apart from belief, also includes disbelief, a neutral attitude commonly called agnosticism or suspension, and degrees of belief or credences. For simplicity, in what follows, I will sometimes use ‘belief’ as a shorthand for all this variety of doxastic attitudes.

  2. This label was coined by Hookway (2006), from whom Friedman borrows it.

  3. A common assumption holds that epistemology also studies the norms governing belief formation, revision, and maintenance. However, some philosophers believe that epistemic norms focus exclusively on the synchronic rationality of belief states (Feldman, 2000; Hedden, 2015; Thorstad, 2021, 2022).

  4. ‘Zetetic’ derives from the Greek verb ζητέω, which means ‘seek for’ or ‘inquire after’ (Friedman, 2020).

  5. I reproduce Friedman’s original statement of the principle. ZIP has raised some criticism for being formulated as a narrow-scope requirement (Steglich-Petersen, 2021) and as an anankastic conditional (Dutant, J., Littlejohn, C., and Rosenkranz, S., "On the zetetic and the epistemic", unpublished ms.). I will deal with some problems arising from ZIP’s formulation in due course (see Sect. 3.3). Still, for most of the paper, I will take ZIP at face value and assume, for the sake of argument, that the prescription in its consequent detaches in the relevant cases under discussion.

  6. Friedman says that ZIP is also in tension with epistemic norms that issue obligations instead of permissions and norms that govern belief-states instead of acts of judgment or belief formation. For the purposes of this paper, though, it will suffice to focus on the tension between ZIP and the Pa-norms.

  7. The attentive reader may have noticed the somewhat indistinct manner in which I've been using the terms ‘zetetic’ and ‘zetetically grounded’ up to this point. To be clear, this aligns with Friedman’s usage of these terms: a norm is zetetically grounded just if it qualifies as a zetetic norm—in the sense of being a norm whose purpose is to guide us in our efforts to resolve our inquiries (see Friedman, 2020, p. 532). In Sect. 4, I will suggest that we should understand what it is for a norm to be zetetically grounded in a more nuanced way. Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to clarify this point.

  8. In what sense the phenomena I aim to discuss here amount to a kind of pragmatic encroachment is something I will clarify later in this section.

  9. The claim that our research agendas are ultimately shaped by our practical situation sounds quite natural to me, and I am not aware of any author who argues otherwise. Friedman herself suggests that the most straightforward reason why an inquiry might be temporally urgent is “because we need some information in order to act” (2020, p. 509, emphasis added). While it is true that sometimes we can prioritize some inquiries “because we’re just deeply curious about some question” (ibid), these cases seem to be outliers in the cognitive life of most individuals. Moreover, even for those who devote most of their time to intellectual endeavors, practical considerations still dominate in at least two respects. First, the decision to embrace a contemplative life is fundamentally a practical choice about how one wants to live. Second, dedication to contemplation can only happen in the absence of more pressing practical concerns.

  10. For a helpful survey of the recent literature on pragmatic encroachment, see Kim (2017). Classical discussions can be found in Hawthorne (2003), Stanley (2005), DeRose (2009), and Fantl & McGrath (2009).

  11. Williamson’s seminal treatments in (1996) and (2000) have spawned a sprawling literature on the epistemic norms of assertion. For useful overviews, see Brown and Cappelen (2011), Goldberg (2020), and Pagin and Marsili (2021).

  12. I’m thankful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this interpretation of Pickpocket.

  13. This is how Christoph Kelp accounts for cases in which one continues inquiring after having settled (2021, pp. 59–60).

  14. Actually, those who explicitly endorse the Belief Norm (e.g., Hindriks, 2007; and Bach, 2008) tend to supplement their accounts with the proviso that a belief is normatively appropriate only if it complies with an epistemic norm (paradigmatically, the Knowledge Norm of Belief).

  15. The Knowledge Norm has been defended, among others, by Williamson (1996, 2000), DeRose (2002), Hawthorne (2003), Stanley (2005), and Engel (2008). Defenses of the Justified Belief Norm can be found in Lackey (2007) and Kvanvig (2009).

  16. See Bratman (1981). For arguments that intentions or aims cannot generate obligations, see Broome (2001), Brunero (2007), and Kolodny (2011).

  17. I’m thankful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this possibility.

  18. See Wrenn (2007), Nelson (2010), Littlejohn (2012), and Nottelmann (2021). Relatedly, in response to worries raised by Bykvist & Hattiangadi (2007), Whiting (2010, 2013) defends that the Truth Norm of Belief should be stated in terms of permissibility: One may believe that p iff it is true that p.

  19. For defenses that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering, see Hall & Johnson (1998) and Flores & Woodard (2023). Relatedly, one can read the literature on normative defeat as implicitly defending that there are duties to gather evidence that have a normative import on the epistemic status of our beliefs (see Lackey, 2014; Goldberg, 2017, 2018). For a recent defense that there is an epistemic duty to double-check in light of countervailing higher-order evidence, see Palmira (2023).

  20. One could try to salvage Z = E by arguing that ZIP is not a genuine zetetic norm. Though there are grounds to pursue this strategy, I will set it aside in what follows and take issue with Z = E.

  21. Against this, philosophers like Boyle (2009, 2011) or Hieronymi (2009) have argued that we exercise some kind of agency in believing. See Chrisman (2018) and Setiya (2013) for arguments against their views.

  22. See Alston (1988) for a classical attack on the deontological conception of justification built upon the thesis of doxastic involuntarism. Influential responses include Steup (2000), Feldman (2000), and Kornblith (2001).

  23. This is actually the most natural reading, as Friedman herself points out: “isn’t the best explanation of one’s having a requirement to form a belief that one has a requirement to have that belief?” (2020, p. 520).

  24. Important defenses of epistemic instrumentalism include Foley (1987, 1992), Kornblith (1993), Leite (2007), Schroeder (2008), Cowie (2014), Steglich-Petersen (2018), Sharadin (2018, 2021), Dyke (2021), and Willoughby, (2022). For criticisms, see Kelly (2003, 2007), Lockard (2013), Côté-Bouchard (2015, 2016), and Buckley (2021).

  25. This is terminology I borrow from Steglich-Petersen (2021).

  26. For an overview of the right kind of reasons/wrong kind of reasons distinction, see Gertken & Kiesewetter (2017).

  27. Indeed, AN* would be perfectly compatible with alternative pictures that don’t make the norms of belief and inquiry coalesce. One such picture could be Baehr's (2011) account of the relationship between character-based virtue epistemology and traditional epistemology. Thorstad’s (2021, 2022) contention that epistemologists should study zetetic norms, even though these norms are not stricto sensu epistemic, could also be rationalized by AN*.

  28. Another concern I won’t develop here is that the view might generate problematic epistemic trade-offs. For discussion, see Falbo (2023, Sect. 5.1.).

  29. This problem was first pointed out by Horowitz. For discussion, see Horowitz (2019), and Thorstad (2022). In contrast, see Singer & Aronowitz (2022) for a defense that we can indeed have epistemic reasons to eat sandwiches.

  30. For instance, Flores & Woodard (2023) have recently defended that there exist epistemic norms on evidence-gathering on the ground that poor evidence-gathering practices are subject to a distinctive kind of epistemic blame. Following Kelp (2021), Palmira (2023., Sect. 2.2) conceives of inquiry as an activity with a constitutive epistemic aim that determines a critical domain and takes the norms that assess those things that are distinctive of this domain to be epistemic.

  31. It is quite telling that these authors make considerable efforts to show that their proposals don’t deliver epistemic norms on eating sandwiches (see also Fleisher, 2023, Sect. 5.2). In a sense, one could read these accounts as aiming to give us criteria to distinguish those zetetic norms that are distinctively epistemic from those that are not, and leaving putative sandwich norms out of the epistemic is one of the main desiderata that motivates their respective accounts.

  32. The following discussion is deeply indebted to similar proposals advanced by Côté-Bouchard (2021), Maguire & Woods (2020), and Sharadin (2022).

  33. For arguments against this distinction, see Paakkunainen (2018).

  34. More precisely, it would constitute an independent critical domain, in the sense advanced by Sosa (2007).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Michele Palmira and two anonymous referees for this journal for their valuable insights and comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also deeply indebted to the organizers of the Taller Complutense de Filosofía Analítica at the Complutense University of Madrid and the SEFA Conference at Santiago de Compostela in December 2022 for providing me with the opportunity to present earlier drafts of this work. I extend my appreciation to the attendees at both events for their constructive feedback, with special thanks to Elia Zardini, Sven Rosenkranz, and Javier González de Prado. Work on this article has been supported by the Spanish Government’s Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades under Grant Agreement PID-2021-123938NB-100.

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    David Domínguez

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Domínguez, D. Unzipping the zetetic turn. Synthese 202, 194 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04407-9

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