Abstract:How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are not sure of. For example, you might think that it will rain sometime this month, but not be… Show more
“…Once that earlier conclusion is accepted, it is quite unclear what doxastic attitudes remain as candidates for knowledge-level commitment, and why we should expect any such attitude to exist. Goodman and Holguín (2023) argue that there is no reason to expect there to be any such attitude, on the grounds that the important theoretical roles relating doxastic attitudes to action are already taken by thinking and by being sure. For example, they argue that being sure is the norm on assertion, and that being unsure is the norm on inquiry.…”
Section: Forgotten Evidencementioning
confidence: 96%
“…The same goes for any level of confidence short of being sure: I don't know whether it rained and I'm not sure whether it did, but I'm pretty confident that it did sounds fine, for example. In this connection, Goodman and Holguín (2023) argue that being sure can be characterized as the degree of confidence at which a knowledge norm kicks in, where degrees of confidence are understood as in Goodman (2023b).…”
Section: Neither Thinking Nor Being Surementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Goodman and Holguín (2023) argue that there is no reason to expect there to be any such attitude, on the grounds that the important theoretical roles relating doxastic attitudes to action are already taken by thinking and by being sure. For example, they argue that being sure is the norm on assertion, and that being unsure is the norm on inquiry.…”
Section: Against Full Beliefmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This section summarizes a line of argument from Goodman and Holguín (2023) for the conclusion that neither thinking, nor being sure, nor any intermediate degree of confidence is a kind of knowledge-level commitment. This is because neither thinking nor any degree of confidence short of being sure is subject to a knowledge norm in the way that being sure is, and being sure is not necessary for knowing.…”
Section: Neither Thinking Nor Being Surementioning
“…Once that earlier conclusion is accepted, it is quite unclear what doxastic attitudes remain as candidates for knowledge-level commitment, and why we should expect any such attitude to exist. Goodman and Holguín (2023) argue that there is no reason to expect there to be any such attitude, on the grounds that the important theoretical roles relating doxastic attitudes to action are already taken by thinking and by being sure. For example, they argue that being sure is the norm on assertion, and that being unsure is the norm on inquiry.…”
Section: Forgotten Evidencementioning
confidence: 96%
“…The same goes for any level of confidence short of being sure: I don't know whether it rained and I'm not sure whether it did, but I'm pretty confident that it did sounds fine, for example. In this connection, Goodman and Holguín (2023) argue that being sure can be characterized as the degree of confidence at which a knowledge norm kicks in, where degrees of confidence are understood as in Goodman (2023b).…”
Section: Neither Thinking Nor Being Surementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Goodman and Holguín (2023) argue that there is no reason to expect there to be any such attitude, on the grounds that the important theoretical roles relating doxastic attitudes to action are already taken by thinking and by being sure. For example, they argue that being sure is the norm on assertion, and that being unsure is the norm on inquiry.…”
Section: Against Full Beliefmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This section summarizes a line of argument from Goodman and Holguín (2023) for the conclusion that neither thinking, nor being sure, nor any intermediate degree of confidence is a kind of knowledge-level commitment. This is because neither thinking nor any degree of confidence short of being sure is subject to a knowledge norm in the way that being sure is, and being sure is not necessary for knowing.…”
Section: Neither Thinking Nor Being Surementioning
“…Other alternatives to Ignorance Norm have been proposed. Goodman and Holguín (2022) propose a norm about being sure: Unsurety Norm One ought not: be sure that p Q and inquire into Q .…”
This article provides an overview of recent work on norms of inquiry. After some preliminaries about inquiry in §1, I discuss in §2 the ignorance norm for inquiry, presenting arguments for and against, as well as some alternatives. In §3, I consider its relation to the aim of inquiry. In §4, I discuss positive norms on inquiry: norms that require having rather than lacking certain states. Finally, in §5, I look at questions about the place of norms of inquiry within normative epistemology.
What is the relationship between inquiry and epistemology? Are epistemic norms the norms that guide us as inquirers-as agents in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding? Recently, there has been growing support for what I, following Friedman (2020), will call the zetetic turn in epistemology, the view that all epistemic norms are norms of inquiry. This paper investigates the prospects of an inquiry-centered approach to epistemology and develops several motivations for resisting it. First, I argue that the norms of inquiry are most plausibly seen as practical, not as distinctively epistemic. Second, I argue that a zetetically-grounded epistemology is unable to properly account for the rationality of belief. It fails to account for cases where intuitively irrational beliefs promote inquiry, or where intuitively rational beliefs are zetetically useless or counterproductive to inquiry. The main upshot is this: there must be a source of epistemic normativity that isn't ultimately zetetic.
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