Céline Henne

Zetetic epistemology has been too narrowly focused on a limited class of inquiries, which has led to incorrect conclusions about inquiry in general. In this paper, I defend an activity-centered account of inquiry designed to accommodate a wider variety of inquiries. Within this account, I introduce two distinctions: (1) definite inquiries are concerned with a definite question having a determinate set of possible answers, while indefinite inquiries begin with an indefinite question and involve the development and refinement of their main guiding question as part of the inquiry process; (2) framed inquiries are concerned with a question that presupposes a settled conceptual framework, whereas framing inquiries are concerned with a question whose resolution requires the revision or refinement of the conceptual framework itself. By incorporating indefinite and framing inquiries, this expanded view of inquiry better captures the nature of inquiry as the activity through which cognitively limited agents move from ignorance to knowledge, from confusion to understanding. The paper concludes by examining some of the implications of fully integrating these inquiries into our view of inquiry for two debates in zetetic epistemology: the aim of inquiry and the norms of inquiry.

The goal of this paper is to develop a normative inferentialist account of open texture, inspired mainly by Robert Brandom (1994; 2000). At the level of metasemantics, open texture is explained by the fact that meaning is grounded in social normative practices that are themselves situated, plural, and contingent. While they are sufficiently stable to enable and sustain coordination, practice-based norms become unsettled in the face of disruptive or unexpected circumstances. At the level of semantics, open texture is explained by the fact that inferential norms are always incomplete and potentially incoherent. On the resulting view, open texture appears not just as a genuine phenomenon, but as a ubiquitous feature of concepts that pertains to the very nature of linguistic norms: there is a continuous spectrum between determinacy and indeterminacy, settled norms and unsettled norms. Open texture is visible only when norms become unsettled in the face of novelty and a creative resolution is needed in order to decide how to “go on”. In providing this account, I also reconstruct the historical and theoretical lineage connecting Waismann’s notion of open texture, Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, and Brandom’s normative inferentialism, showing that Brandom not only systematizes Wittgenstein’s view of meaning but also develops Waismann’s distinctive insights, such as the non-monotonicity of non-deductive rules of inference.

What is conceptual engineering about? In this paper, I defend the superiority of the pragmatist account of concepts over the two main contenders in the field – the representationalist account and the psychological account. I evaluate the different contenders with respect to their ability to make sense of the practice of conceptual engineering along two dimensions. First, the feasibility of conceptual engineering. If conceptual engineering is (almost) impossible to achieve because concepts are not the kinds of things that can be revised, there is no point in engaging in such a practice. Second, the distinctiveness of conceptual engineering in relation to other projects such as empirical inquiry or conceptual analysis. If conceptual engineering ends up being more of the same, it is unclear why it deserves the current level of interest, let alone its own field. I argue that the pragmatist account of concepts is the most apt in explaining why conceptual engineering is both feasible and distinctive. Finally, I respond to a possible objection (that my proposal will only appeal to those who are already sold on pragmatism) by showing the value of taking pragmatist concepts as the targets of conceptual engineering in practice, even if one ultimately rejects pragmatist metasemantics.

According to Max Deutsch, conceptual engineers face a dilemma: either they target semantic meanings, in which case they are engaged in an infeasible activity (the “implementation challenge”), or they target speaker meanings, in which case they are engaged in a trivial enterprise (the “trivialization challenge”). Focusing on the first horn of the dilemma, I argue that the “transubstantiation version” of the implementation challenge only holds for representationalist approaches to conceptual engineering, according to which concepts are individuated by their representational relation to phenomena or sets of objects in the world. From a non-representationalist (e.g. pragmatist) perspective, the dilemma is therefore dissolved. Nevertheless, Deutsch’s article still deserves a response from the pragmatist, since it raises a more general challenge to conceptual engineering that I dub the “practical implementation challenge”. I offer a pragmatist solution to that challenge, drawing on John Dewey’s theory of inquiry and Robert Brandom’s inferentialism. This solution includes recommendations distributed across all stages of the engineering process, in privileging projects that are (1) problem-driven, (2) bottom-up; ensuring that the proposal is (3) clearly justified, (4) maintains continuity with the existing inferential role; and finally, in (5) enforcing the novel concept in practices of deontic scorekeeping, (6) backed up by institutional or intellectual authority.

Do physicists believe that general relativity is true, and that electrons and phonons exist, and if so, in what sense? To what extent does the spectrum of positions among physicists correspond to philosophical positions like scientific realism, instrumentalism, or perspectivism? Does agreement with these positions correlate with demographic factors, and are realist physicists more likely to support research projects purely aimed at increasing knowledge? We conducted a questionnaire study to scrutinize the philosophical stances of physicists. We received responses from 384 physicists and 151 philosophers. Our main findings are (1) On average, physicists tend toward scientific realism, and slightly more so than philosophers of science. (2) Physicists can be clustered into five groups. Three show variants of scientific realism, one is instrumentalist, and one seems undecided or incoherent. (3) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with approval of building a bigger particle collider. (4) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with the seniority of physicists. (5) We did not find correlations with other factors, such as whether physicists focus on theoretical or experimental research and whether they engage with applied or basic research.

In this article, I draw an important distinction between two kinds of inquiry. “Framed inquiries” take for granted and use a conceptual framework in order to ask and answer questions, while “framing inquiries” require the creation, revision, or expansion of the conceptual framework itself in order to address the problem at hand. This distinction has been largely ignored in epistemology, and collapsed by two radically opposed philosophical camps: representationalism and antirepresentationalism. While the former takes all inquiries to be in the business of discovering mind-independent facts, the latter takes all inquiries to be primarily governed by pragmatic considerations. Against the objections raised by both camps, I defend a pragmatist and substantive distinction between framed and framing inquiry, inspired by Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions and reformulated in terms of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry.

In discussing instrumentalism in philosophy of science, John Dewey is rarely studied, but rather mentioned in passing to credit him for coining the label. His instrumentalism is often interpreted as the view that science is an instrument designed to control the environment and satisfy our practical ends, or likened to the Duhemian view that scientific objects are useful fictions for organizing observable phenomena. Dewey was careful to qualify the first view and denied holding the second. Furthermore, the observable/unobservable distinction does not play any significant role in Dewey’s instrumentalism. The question then arises: Was the inventor of instrumentalism himself an instrumentalist? I present the key aspects of Dewey’s instrumentalismand contrast his views with the instrumentalism of Mach, Duhem and Poincaré. Dewey’s epistemological instrumentalism is global and not local; nevertheless, it is fallibilist and optimistic, rather than skeptical and pessimistic. Dewey’s ontological instrumentalism concerns the nature of scientific objects, regardless of whether they are observable or unobservable, and is fully compatible with realism about atoms or electrons. Dewey’s practical instrumentalism holds that becausescience provides understanding of the workings of nature rather than an exhaustive picture of reality, it is thebest instrument we have for the enrichment of experience.

ABSTRACT Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

This chapter examines Dewey’s view of moral knowledge developed in Chapter 14 of the Ethics. I focus more specifically on the role played by sympathy in moral inquiry. While Dewey claims that sympathy is “the general principle of moral knowledge” as well as “the surest way to attain objectivity of moral knowledge,” it has not been the object of any extensive discussion by commentators on Dewey’s ethics. I emphasize the originality of Dewey’s position by contrasting it with that of David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, who all stressed the fundamental role of sympathy in making moral judgments. Accordingly, I examine their respective answers to the moral problem raised by natural sympathy: how can such a biased and partial psychological mechanism play a beneficial role in the formation of moral judgments, which specifically aim at impartiality and objectivity? I will argue that while Hume, Smith, and Mill choose to simply extend the scope of natural sympathy, Dewey argues in favor of a deeper transformation of natural sympathy: (1) the spontaneous emotional reaction becomes intentional perspective-taking; (2) it loses its function of direct approval or disapproval, and takes on an epistemic function of data-gathering subordinated to moral reasoning.

This thesis develops Dewey’s theory of inquiry and provides a novel perspective on what realists consider to be Dewey’s most controversial claims: his rejection of the view that inquiry aims at providing an accurate representation of reality, his claim that the object of knowledge is constructed, and his definition of truth in terms of warranted assertibility or fulfilment of the requirements of a problem. My strategy is to draw a gradual and relative distinction between what I call “framed” and “framing” inquiry. While the distinction is not explicitly present in Dewey’s works, it rests on Dewey’s functional distinction between existential and universal propositions. In a framed inquiry, the problem is covered by an existing conceptual framework, which is used to resolve the problem, without being revised. In a framing inquiry, the problem is underdetermined by existing conceptual frameworks, which are created, revised, or expanded. My general argument is that Dewey’s main contribution and controversial claims should be understood in the context of framing inquiry. In Chapter 1, I set the stage for the thesis. I paint the portrait of Dewey as the archetypal anti-realist; I present pragmatism as moving above this debate; and I present the specifically Deweyan brand of pragmatism. In Chapter 2, I introduce the distinction between framed and framing inquiry. In Chapter 3, I argue that realist notions of knowledge as representation, existence as independent facts, truth as correspondence can be cast in terms of framed inquiry, while most realists mistakenly interpret these notions as “unframed.” In the next three chapters, I defend and develop Dewey’s views for framing inquiry. In Chapter 4, I argue that framing inquiry should be construed as articulating rather than representing reality. In Chapter 5, I maintain that Dewey’s view avoids idealism. In Chapter 6, I defend the pragmatist theory of truth as a standard for framing inquiry, by contrast with representational standards.