PHIL 257: Inquiry

Graduate seminar (co-taught with Susanna Siegel). An examination of the epistemic and psychological structures of inquiry and related phenomena. Questions to be addressed will be both normative and descriptive. They will include: What is inquiry? What, if anything, is its aim? Does it have formal features, which can be characterized independently of inquiring minds? Regarding inquiring minds: What kinds of psychological states, processes, activities, or dispositions does inquiry involve? What kinds of psychological factors facilitate inquiry, and what kinds inhibit it? What is inquiry’s relationship to attention, ignorance, evidence gathering, reasoning, wondering, curiosity, and suspension of judgment? What is it to have a question open in thought? Regarding norms of inquiry: What are the norms governing appropriate and inappropriate ways of opening up an inquiry, carrying out an inquiry, and bringing an inquiry to a close? Are some or all of these norms epistemic? Are some or all of these norms interest dependent? How do the norms that govern inquiry relate to traditional epistemic norms governing belief and other doxastic attitudes? Should we replace the latter with the former?