Drawing inspiration from the notion of evocation employed in inferential erotetic logic, we defend an ‘evoked questions norm’ on inquiring attitudes. According to this norm, it is rational to have an inquiring attitude concerning a question only if that question is evoked by your background information. We offer two arguments for this norm. First, we develop an argument from convergence. Insights from several independent literatures (20th-century ordinary-language philosophy, inferential erotetic logic, inquisitive epistemic logic, and contemporary zetetic epistemology) all converge on (...) the evoked questions norm. Second, we show that suitably interpreted, the evoked questions norm correctly predicts several underappreciated kinds of bad questions. It does this, in part, by recovering versions of previously defended ignorance and knowledge norms. Some of those bad questions cannot be predicted by either norm singly, but only when corporately taken to reflect a common normative category. We identify this category as evocation. (shrink)

What is the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence? Recently, philosophers have defended zetetic approaches to higher-order evidence, which appeal to factors related to inquiry. According to such views, in response to higher order evidence, one should open inquiry and deliberate on the question further. While it can often be productive to inquire in response to higher-order evidence, whether one should inquire is settled on primarily practical—not purely epistemic—grounds. I defend various cases where one can rationally respond to higher-order evidence without (...) engaging in zetetic activity of any kind. Zetetic responses to higher-order evidence are thus bound to be incomplete. Reflection on these cases suggests a deeper lesson: epistemic norms never require us to engage in inquiry or to perform any action whatsoever. Zetetic proposals give rise to an overly demanding and implausible picture of normative epistemology, according to which epistemic norms are in the business of helping us to settle the answers to our questions. However, epistemic norms do not—and importantly should not—be expected to fulfill this role. (shrink)

We use the normality framework of Goodman and Salow (2018, 2021, 2023b) to investigate of dynamics of rational belief. The guiding idea is that people are entitled to believe that their circumstances aren’t especially abnormal. More precisely, a rational agent’s beliefs rule out all and only those possibilities that are either (i) ruled out by their evidence or (ii) sufficiently less normal than some other possibility not ruled out by their evidence. Working within this framework, we argue that the logic (...) of rational belief revision is much weaker than is usually supposed. We do so by isolating a natural family of orthodox principles about belief revision, describing realistic cases in which these principles seem to fail, and showing how these counterexamples are predicted by independently motivated models of the cases in question. In these models, whether one evidential possibility counts as sufficiently less normal than another is determined by underlying probabilities (together with a contextually determined question). We argue that the resulting probabilistic account of belief compares favorably with other such accounts, including Lockeanism (Foley, 1993), a ‘stability’ account inspired by Leitgeb (2017), the ‘tracking theory’ of Lin and Kelly (2012), and the influential precursor of Levi (1967). We show that all of these accounts yield subtly different but similarly heterodox logics of belief revision. (shrink)