Tez Clark

This paper concerns zetetic success, or success in inquiry. Recent work in epistemology largely assumes that zetetic success is a matter of learning the “complete answer” to one's question. Unfortunately, a natural way of understanding this claim renders it false. This paper instead starts with the suggestion that zetetic success is a matter of learning the right answer to one's question, where this claim may be understood as context-sensitive in ways that parallel the (apparent) context-sensitivity of knowledge. The paper then develops three possible views: Zetetic Invariantism, Zetetic Contextualism, and Zetetic Interest-Relative Invariantism (IRI), and tentatively comes down in favor of Zetetic IRI.

This paper develops several challenges to recent accounts of incoherence, inspired by familiar challenges to accounts of analyticity. I focus on accounts that claim certain combinations of attitudes are incoherent—i.e., structurally irrational—iff each of their instances satisfies some condition C. After distinguishing between Type-1 and Type-2 accounts of incoherence, I argue that the former face problems similar to those facing metaphysical accounts of analyticity, while the latter face challenges similar to those facing epistemological accounts of analyticity. The paper concludes by outlining three paths forward for work on incoherence.