Inquiry

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.