Rules for the Inquiring Mind

A Unified Framework of Norms of Inquiry

Luis Rosa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781032859064
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040146934
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

This book concerns the nature and the norms of inquiry. It tackles not only philosophical issues regarding what inquiry is, but also issues regarding how it should and should not be executed. Roughly put, inquiry is the activity of searching for the true answers to questions of our interest. But what is the difference between empirical and armchair inquiry? And what are the right and the wrong ways to inquire? Under what conditions should one start inquiring? Which questions are such that one should not inquire into them? The book offers answers to these questions. It argues that competent armchair inquiry only makes explicit what was already implicit—the inquirer already had the answer to her question before inquiring into it, though this was not explicit to her. It also argues that we should avoid inquiring into questions whose answers are unknowable to us, in the instrumental sense of 'should', and that different modes of inquiry are called for, depending on which type of information is available to the subject. These answers are rigorously argued for, and they stem from a unified framework for modeling the activity of inquiry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The conceptual groundwork
• 2 Settling a question and the requisite information
• 3 A possible-worlds model of inquiry
• 4 New model, new norms
• 5 Critical scrutiny of the Go Gather Norm
• 6 Critical scrutiny of the Go Figure Norm
• 7 Critical scrutiny of the Knowledge Norm
• 8 The Anti-Impossibility Norm of Inquiry
• 9 The instrumental benefits of violating instrumental norms
• 10 Norms of inquiry vs. norms of interrogative attitudes, and a norm against pseudo-questions
• 11 A system of instrumental norms of inquiry
• References
• Index