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 (...) same practice across such different human settings suggests it is a core feature of inquiry. (shrink)

Philosophy of language in the 21st century has cultivated a concern for the hateful, the coercive, and the lethal. Amidst this shift of attention toward politically significant speech, ‘non-ideal’ philosophers of language investigate whether common conceptual toolkits from ‘mainstream’ philosophy of language manage to make contact with our non-ideal world in the first place. Drawing on a tradition of Wittgensteinian critical social thought, I contend that philosophers of language risk their (ideology‐)critical bite when they isolate our words from the activities (...) into which they are woven. That is, when philosophers fail to register our ordinary investment in the words we put on display—the interests, stakes, and concerns in light of which we voice them—we make their political import unavailable to philosophy of language. But the non-ideal philosopher’s concept of idealization is itself a normatively non-neutral tool; and, as such, it exemplifies the sort of theoretical resource that may be mobilized with an investment in shaping not only our epistemic resources but also our senses of what matters. (shrink)