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Mind and Language 33 (2):130-147 (2018)

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  1. The Contents and Causes of Curiosity.Peter Carruthers - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    There has been a flurry of recent work on the cognitive neuroscience of curiosity. But everyone in the field offers definitions of curiosity that are meta-cognitive in nature. Curiosity is said to be a desire for knowledge, or a motivation to learn about something, and so on. This appears problematic. It either makes it difficult to see how curiosity can properly be attributed to cats and rats (let alone birds and bees), or it commits us to attributing capacities for self-awareness (...)
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  • (1 other version)Why Double-Check?Elise Woodard - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):644-667.
    Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, (...)
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  • Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion.Dennis Whitcomb & Jared Millson - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (3):444-466.
    A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might prohibit having certain inquiring attitudes (“norms of restriction”), while ignoring those that might require having them (“norms of expansion”). We aim to address that omission by offering a framework that generates norms of expansion for inquiring attitudes. (...)
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  • Inquiry for the Mistaken and Confused.Arianna Falbo - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Various philosophers have recently defended norms of inquiry which forbid inquiry into questions which lack true answers. I argue that these norms are overly restrictive, and that they fail to capture an important relationship between inquiry and our position as non-ideal epistemic agents. I defend a more flexible and forgiving norm: Epistemic Improvement. According to this norm, inquiry into a question is permissible only if it’s not rational for one to be sure that by inquiring one won’t improve epistemically upon (...)
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  • Rules for the Inquiring Mind: A Unified Framework of Norms of Inquiry.Luis Rosa - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    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 (...)
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  • Inquiry, reasoning and the normativity of logic.van Remmen Maximilian - 2024 - Synthese 203 (3):1-28.
    According to the traditional view in the philosophy of logic facts of logic bear normative authority regarding how one ought to reason. Usually this is to mean that the relation of logical consequence between statements has some special relevance for how one’s beliefs should cohere. However, as I will argue in this article, this is just one way in which logic is normative for reasoning. For one thing, belief is not the only kind of mental state involved in reasoning. Besides (...)
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  • Inquiry, Questions, and Actions.Benoit Guilielmo - 2024 - Dialogue 63 (2):339-356.
    This article aims to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of inquiry. I start with some common desiderata for any theory of inquiry. I then categorize inquiry as a structured process. By focusing on its essential components, I advance a new characterization of inquiry as a combination of questioning attitudes guiding actions. Finally, I turn to the recent objection that questioning attitudes are not necessary for inquiry. I argue that inquiry is a structured process essentially constituted by questioning attitudes (...)
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  • How do lines of inquiry unfold? Insights from journalism.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Special Issue on Applied Epistemology.
    I analyze a type of practice related to inquiry: treating things as zetetically relevant to questions, and argue that this practice is a central normatively evaluable way to extend lines of inquiry. My strategy is to introduce the practice and its normative features by examining its relationship to something already well-understood: the ways that news stories produced by journalists frame events. I then argue that the same core zetetic practice can be found across domains, just not in journalism. Finding the (...)
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  • Wandering Inquiry.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an answer. On this picture, inquiry is both telic and guided. By contrast, mind-wandering is unguided and atelic, according to the most extensively developed philosophical theory of it. This paper articulates a puzzle that arises from this combination of claims: there seem to be plenty of (...)
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  • Asking expresses a desire to know.Peter van Elswyk - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    A speaker’s use of a sentence does more than contribute a content to a conversation. It also expresses the speaker’s attitude. This essay is about which attitude or attitudes are expressed by using an interrogative sentence to ask a question. With reference to eight lines of data about how questions are circulated in conversation, it is argued that a desire to know the question’s answer(s) is expressed.
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  • Norms of Inquiry.Eliran Haziza - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (12):e12952.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Are humans the only rational animals?Giacomo Melis & Susana Monsó - 2023 - The Philosophical Quarterly (3):844-864.
    While growing empirical evidence suggests a continuity between human and non-human psychology, many philosophers still think that only humans can act and form beliefs rationally. In this paper, we challenge this claim. We first clarify the notion of rationality. We then focus on the rationality of beliefs and argue that, in the relevant sense, humans are not the only rational animals. We do so by first distinguishing between unreflective and reflective responsiveness to epistemic reasons in belief formation and revision. We (...)
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  • The Curious Case of Uncurious Creation.Lindsay Brainard - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper seeks to answer the question: Can contemporary forms of artificial intelligence be creative? To answer this question, I consider three conditions that are commonly taken to be necessary for creativity. These are novelty, value, and agency. I argue that while contemporary AI models may have a claim to novelty and value, they cannot satisfy the kind of agency condition required for creativity. From this discussion, a new condition for creativity emerges. Creativity requires curiosity, a motivation to pursue epistemic (...)
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  • Two Kinds of Curiosity.Daniela Dover - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):811-832.
    Leading philosophical models of curiosity represent it as a desiderative attitude whose content is a question, and which is satisfied by knowledge of the answer to that question. I argue that these models do not capture the distinctive character of a form of curiosity that I call 'erotic curiosity'. Erotic curiosity addresses itself not to a question but to an object whose significance for the inquirer is affective as well as epistemic. This form of curiosity is best understood by analogy (...)
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  • Natural Curiosity.Jennifer Nagel - 2024 - In Artūrs Logins & Jacques Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Curiosity is evident in humans of all sorts from early infancy, and it has also been said to appear in a wide range of other animals, including monkeys, birds, rats, and octopuses. The classical definition of curiosity as an intrinsic desire for knowledge may seem inapplicable to animal curiosity: one might wonder how and indeed whether a rat could have such a fancy desire. Even if rats must learn many things to survive, one might expect their learning must be driven (...)
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  • Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion.Dennis Whitcomb & Jared Millson - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (3):444-466.
    A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might *prohibit* having certain inquiring attitudes (``norms of restriction''), while ignoring those that might *require* having them (``norms of expansion''). We aim to address that omission by offering a framework that generates norms of expansion for inquiring attitudes. (...)
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  • What Is the Feeling of Effort About?Juan Pablo Bermúdez - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Curious to Know.Eliran Haziza - 2022 - Episteme:1-15.
    What is curiosity? An attractive option is that it is a desire to know. This analysis has been recently challenged by what I call interrogativism, the view that inquiring attitudes such as curiosity have questions rather than propositions as contents. In this paper, I defend the desire-to-know view, and make three contributions to the debate. First, I refine the view in a way that avoids the problems of its simplest version. Second, I present a new argument for the desire-to-know view (...)
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  • The Knowledge Norm for Inquiry.Christopher Willard-Kyle - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (11):615-640.
    A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Why Double-Check?Elise Woodard - 2022 - Episteme:1-24.
    Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, (...)
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  • Million Dollar Questions: Why Deliberation is More Than Information Pooling.Daniel Hoek & Richard Bradley - forthcoming - Social Choice and Welfare.
    Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents’ informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, (...)
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  • Inquiring Minds Want to Improve.Arianna Falbo - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2).
    Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...)
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  • The Ignorance Norm and Paradoxical Assertions.Elise Woodard - 2022 - Philosophical Topics 49 (2):321-332.
    Can agents rationally inquire into things that they know? On my view, the answer is yes. Call this view the Compatibility Thesis. One challenge to this thesis is to explain why assertions like “I know that p, but I’m wondering whether p” sound odd, if not Moore-Paradoxical. In response to this challenge, I argue that we can reject one or both premises that give rise to it. First, we can deny that inquiry requires interrogative attitudes. Second, we can deny the (...)
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  • Wondering on and with Purpose.Daniel Drucker - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 2:58-84.
    I make a proposal about what wondering is and how it differs from other mental phenomena like curiosity. I argue that, though it's tempting to analyze wondering as a desire to know the answer to the question one wonders about, that would be wrong, since wondering is an activity rather than a state, i.e., something we do. I also argue that wondering about a question needn't even essentially involve a desire to know the answer to that question, even as a (...)
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  • Inquiry and Confirmation.Arianna Falbo - 2021 - Analysis 81 (4):622–631.
    A puzzle arises when combining two individually plausible, yet jointly incompatible, norms of inquiry. On the one hand, it seems that one shouldn’t inquire into a question while believing an answer to that question. But, on the other hand, it seems rational to inquire into a question while believing its answer, if one is seeking confirmation. Millson (2021), who has recently identified this puzzle, suggests a possible solution, though he notes that it comes with significant costs. I offer an alternative (...)
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  • Mindreading in conversation.Evan Westra & Jennifer Nagel - 2021 - Cognition 210 (C):104618.
    How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...)
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  • The Interpretive-Sensory Access Theory of Self-Knowledge: Empirical Adequacy and Scientific Fruitfulness.Paulius Rimkevičius - 2020 - Problemos 97:150–163.
    The interpretive-sensory access theory of self-knowledge claims that we come to know our own minds by turning our capacities for knowing other minds onto ourselves. Peter Carruthers argues that two of the theory’s advantages are empirical adequacy and scientific fruitfulness: it leaves few of the old discoveries unexplained and makes new predictions that provide a framework for new discoveries. A decade has now passed since the theory’s introduction. I review the most important developments during this time period regarding the two (...)
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  • The virtue of curiosity.Lewis Ross - 2020 - Episteme 17 (1):105-120.
    ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...)
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  • Wondering and Epistemic Desires.Richard Teague - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    This paper explores the relationship between the questioning attitude of wondering and a class of attitudes I call 'epistemic desires'. Broadly, these are desires to improve one's epistemic position on some question. A common example is the attitude of wanting to know the answer to some question. I argue that one can have any kind of epistemic desire towards any question, Q, without necessarily wondering Q, but not conversely. That is, one cannot wonder Q without having at least some epistemic (...)
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  • Internalized Norms and Intrinsic Motivations: Are Normative Motivations Psychologically Primitive?Daniel Kelly - 2020 - Emotion Researcher 1 (June):36-45.
    My modest aim in this piece is to frame and illuminate some of the issues surrounding normative motivation, rather than take a firm position on any of them. I begin by clarifying the key terms in my title of this essay, and unpacking some of the assumptions that underpin its question. I then distinguish four kinds of answers one might give. In this short essay I will not be able to properly develop and evaluate an argument for the view that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Curious to Know.Eliran Haziza - 2024 - Episteme 21 (3):758-772.
    What is curiosity? An attractive option is that it is a desire to know. This analysis has been recently challenged by what I call interrogativism, the view that inquiring attitudes such as curiosity have questions rather than propositions as contents. In this paper, I defend the desire-to-know view, and make three contributions to the debate. First, I refine the view in a way that avoids the problems of its simplest version. Second, I present a new argument for the desire-to-know view (...)
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  • How to Arrive at Questions.Moritz Cordes - 2021 - In Asking and Answering: Rivalling Approaches to Interrogative Methods. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. pp. 165–175.
    The question of how to arrive at questions is ambiguous. I will concentrate on two readings: (i) How should one set up a formal syntax that accomodates questions? (ii) How does one, while working in a suitable formal language, arrive at a situation where one is allowed to or even must ask a certain question? In other words: How is the asking of questions regulated within a given formal language? I will propose an answer to question (i) and consider the (...)
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  • Why We Need a Question Semantics.Ivano Ciardelli - 2021 - In Moritz Cordes (ed.), Asking and Answering: Rivalling Approaches to Interrogative Methods. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. pp. 15–47.
    In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of language, thought, and communication. Based on these considerations, I argue against the Fregean view that analyzes questions as distinguished only at the level of force. Questions, I argue, are associated with specific semantic objects, which play a distinctive role in thought and in compositional semantics, stand in logical relations to one another, and can act as contents of multiple speech acts. In the second (...)
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  • Propositionalism and Questions that do not have Correct Answers.Giulia Felappi - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):1-19.
    As the label suggests, according to _propositionalism_, each intentional mental state, attitude or event is or involves a relation to a proposition. In this paper, I will discuss a case that seems prima facie not to be accountable for by propositionalism. After having presented the case, I will show why it is different from others that have been discussed in the literature as able to show that propositionalism cannot be correct. I will then consider what the propositionalist can say to (...)
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  • Interest, Disfluency, and Underlying Values: a Better Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure.Heather V. Adair - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):779-795.
    Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012 ). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious (...)
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  • Valence: A reflection.Luca Barlassina - 2021 - Emotion Researcher: ISRE's Sourcebook for Research on Emotion and Affect (C. Todd and E. Wall Eds.).
    This article gives a short presentation of reflexive imperativism, the intentionalist theory of valence I developed with Max Khan Hayward. The theory says that mental states have valence in virtue of having reflexive imperative content. More precisely, mental states have positive valence (i.e., feel good) in virtue of issuing the command "More of me!", and they have negative valence (i.e., feel bad) in virtue of issuing the command "Less of me!" The article summarises the main arguments in favour of reflexive (...)
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  • Simply Finding Answers, or the Entirety of Inquiry While Standing on One Foot.Nicholas Smith - 2020 - Disputatio 12 (57):181-198.
    I argue that inquiry can be defined without reference to the attitudes inquirers have during inquiry. Inquiry can instead be defined by its aim: it is the activity that has the aim of answering a question. I call this approach to defining inquiry a “naive” account. I present the naive account of inquiry in contrast to a prominent contemporary account of inquiry most notably defended by Jane Friedman. According to this view of inquiry, which I call an attitude-centric view, inquiry (...)
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  • Curiosity as a metacognitive feeling.Louise Goupil & Joëlle Proust - 2023 - Cognition 231 (C):105325.
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  • Model-free metacognition.Peter Carruthers & David M. Williams - 2022 - Cognition 225 (C):105117.
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  • What is it to have an inquisitive attitude?Benoit Https://Orcidorg Gaultier - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Following a common assumption, when one inquires into a question, one has an inquisitive attitude towards it. More precisely, I shall assume that there is an inquisitive attitude towards Q that all of those who inquire into Q have in common and in virtue of which they can be said to be in an inquisitive state of mind towards Q. This paper is about the nature of this attitude. I elucidate it by examining whether it boils down to doubt, curiosity, (...)
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  • Inquiry and trust: An epistemic balancing act.Heather Rabenberg - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (2-3):583-601.
    It might initially appear impossible to inquire into whether p while trusting someone that p. At the very least, it might appear that doing so would be irrational. In this paper, I shall argue that things are not as they appear. Not only is it possible for a person to inquire into whether p while trusting someone that p, it is very often rational. Indeed, combining inquiry and trust in this way is an epistemic balancing act central to a well-lived (...)
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  • Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains.Marie Aguirre, Mélanie Brun, Auriane Couderc, Anne Reboul, Philomène Senez & Olivier Mascaro - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (2):e13103.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.
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