Ignasi Gil

For a long time, analytic epistemologists have been almost exclusively interested in knowledge and the states connected to it such as justified true belief. Little thought has been paid to the actions through which we acquire those states. Around 2020, things started to change. Primarily the papers by Jane Friedman led to a ‘zetetic turn’ in epistemology – a shift towards increased focus on inquiry. Her highly innovative and tightly argued papers demonstrated that putting inquiry centre stage provides a variety of novel perspectives to traditional epistemological topics such as the characterization of doxastic attitudes (Friedman 2013, 2017), the relationship between belief and credence (Friedman 2019a) and the coherence of epistemic rationality (Friedman 2020, Forthcoming). Today, many epistemologists look at inquiry to develop new answers to received questions and to expand the range of issues discussed in epistemology. With an ever-growing number of contributions, this review will give a highly selective and necessarily incomplete overview of the epistemology of inquiry. I limit myself to discussing four core questions in the field (§1), before moving on to two recent monographs: David Thorstad’s Inquiry Under Bounds (§2) and Luis Rosa’s Rules for the Inquiring Mind (§3).

Are norms of inquiry in tension with epistemic norms? I provide a (largely) negative answer, turning to a picture of epistemic practices as rule-governed games. The idea is that, while epistemic norms are correctness standards for the attitudes involved in epistemic games, norms of inquiry derive from the aims of those games. Attitudes that, despite being epistemically correct, are inadvisable regarding the goals of some inquiry are just like bad (but legal) moves in basketball or chess. I further consider cases in which the aims of inquiry recommend breaking epistemic norms. I compare them to strategic infractions, which are common in many coherent games. Finally, I explore the connections between rules and aims in games and in inquiry. I show that in both cases respecting the rules is constitutively required for satisfying the aims of the practice.