Inquiry
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 2019 , 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/ |
- Belief (1,943 | 1,010)
- The Basing Relation (107)
- Defeat (181)
- Entitlement (100)
- Epistemic Possibility (124)
- Epistemic Luck (236)
- Evidence (928 | 108)
- Ignorance (208)
- Justification (1,172 | 696)
- Knowledge (4,889 | 700)
- Rationality (2,688 | 2,006)
- Reasons (2,859 | 313)
- Subjectivity and Objectivity (162 | 22)
- Thought and Thinking (474 | 255)
- Understanding (426)
- Warrant (172 | 71)
- Wisdom (387)
- Epistemological States and Properties, Misc (84)
- Questions (508)
- Social Epistemology (6,739 | 2,859)
- American Pragmatism (3,535 | 2,999)
- Belief (1,943 | 1,010)
- Pyrrhonian Skepticism (313)
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