Daniel C. Friedman (Stanford University), "Intentions and Inquiry"
Forthcoming, Mind
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely initiated, conducted, countless inquiries today alone. Some are mundane: Where are my socks? How many goals did Chelsea score? Some are presumably more important: Does my daughter have a fever? What’s for lunch?
Inquiry is thus a ubiquitous and absolutely central human inquiry. We inquire all the time, and in doing so learn about the world around us. Unsurprisingly, foundational questions about inquiry are of paramount importance, and the subject of heated philosophical debate: Who inquires? In virtue of what do they do so? How should they conduct their inquiries? When should they stop?
In “Intentions and Inquiry”, forthcoming in Mind, I develop a new account of inquiry—one which has its heart specific intentions inquirers possess. With these intentions in view, I argue, we can put to bed longstanding debates and get precise about the ubiquitous and important activity of inquiry.
The central building block on my Intention Account of Inquiry is a question-directed intention (QDI), an intention to form a settled attitude towards an answer to a question. Though technical, I think such intentions are familiar often under the guise of intending to settle our questions, to make up our minds. When an agent holds and acts on such an intention, they inquire.
This intention-centric approach to inquiry is natural, but actually stands in contrast to much theorizing about our inquiry-related lives. Many mainstream accounts of inquiry focus primarily on our curiosity or wondering about answers to questions. There are two reasons I think the Intention Account does better by eschewing the centrality of curiosity. For one, if all it takes to inquire, and thus to be subject to demanding norms of inquiry is to be curious, then a mere day-dreamer incurs and violates countless such obligations in the course of letting her mind wander. Furthermore, we fail to capture as inquirers those agents who could care less about their topic of investigation, a disgruntled post-doc in a dead-end lab, but who nevertheless it seems important to recognize as pursuing knowledge. Of course, there are ways of tinkering with curiosity-centric proposals to get the right results. I argue, however, that most ways this goes reduce to something like positing a QDI or fail to capture the kinds of inquiries that are important to recognize for our socio-epistemic purposes.
I understand the notion of a settled attitude as a kind of place-holder. We inquirers often have in mind a more specific epistemic goal at which our inquiry aims: usually knowledge but also belief, certainty, acceptance, and understanding. This pluralism about inquiry’s aims is helpful. It allows us to recognize that different inquirers aim at different epistemic goals.
It also helps explain what goes on in cases where inquirers continue to inquire (permissibly) beyond a goal they’ve already secured: cases of double-checking.
Once we’ve understood who is an inquirer, and in virtue of what, we can ask how inquiries should go. Philosophical orthodoxy suggests that inquiries go well insofar as inquirers achieve their goals, and thus the more efficiently and effectively they do so, the better. On this picture, norms of inquiry are a species of instrumental norm. Recent and influential arguments by Jane Friedman, however, suggest that we should think of inquiry as, in the first, an epistemic activity (Friedman, 2020). After all, inquirers want to secure epistemic goods, and they use norms of inquiry as guides to achieving these epistemic goals. Unfortunately, if Friedman is right, we face a deep tension at the heart of epistemic normativity: norms of inquiry and standard epistemic norms don’t mesh. The standard epistemic norms which tell you that you are permitted to come to know what your evidence supports clash with the inquiring norms telling you to inquire efficiently and stay focused on the question at hand. Friedman argues that once we recognize this conflict, we’re left with three ways out: abandon the picture of inquiry as an epistemic activity and thereby deny that norms of inquiry are epistemic, abandon standard epistemic norms, or make do with tension in our picture of the normative landscape (Thorstad, 2021).
The Intention Account offers a principled and attractive way of taking the first path. Intentions are generally subject to certain practical norms, norms of plan rationality. These involve the instrumental pressures discussed above. So, by adopting the Intention Account, we have a way of denying any tension in our picture of epistemic normativity. Inquiry’s norms are just norms of plan rationality. Still, the Intention Account can recognize an important sense in which Friedman is right. Inquiry is an epistemic activity, in virtue of the epistemic content in an inquirer’s QDI. Inquirers must thus stand prepared to balance competing epistemic and practical considerations, in pursuit of their specific epistemic goals.
While I think the Intention Account offers an interesting new picture of inquiry worthy of further research, what I’m most excited about is its potential fecundity. This action-oriented picture of inquiring puts us in a position for further work isolating the ways we exert our epistemic agency which matter, at least from the perspective of epistemic evaluation. It also sets the stage for further work in thinking about how we inquire together. On some models of working together, intentions held by individuals figure in constructing shared intentions, which govern our cooperation (Bratman, 2014). Extending the Intention Account to capture cases of shared inquiry is something I take up in other work. Getting clear on inquiry at the individual level, as well as the interplay of cooperation and our epistemic endeavors, are two upshots of taking seriously intentions in inquiry.
References
Bratman, Michael E. (2014). Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Friedman, Jane (2020). “The Epistemic and the Zetetic”. The Philosophical Review 129 (4): 501–536.
Thorstad, David (2021). “Inquiry and the epistemic”. Philosophical Studies 178 (9): 2913– 2928.