Into Question: An Account of Inquiry The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39945331 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Into Question: An Account of Inquiry A dissertation presented by Lauren Davidson to The Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Philosophy Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts December 2017 © 2017 Lauren Davidson All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Edward Hall Lauren Davidson Into Question: An Account of Inquiry Abstract Inquiry is central to our lives as knowers. From the quotidian ‘where did I leave my keys’ to the most momentous of research questions, we update our beliefs via inquiries large and small every day. Plausibly then, we achieve a much more complete picture of agents’ epistemic lives when we take into account not just what they believe or know but also the questions they have open for inquiry. Such is the approach to epistemology that motivates my dissertation. The enclosed papers present an account of inquiry from the perspective of philosophy of mind. The account provides sufficient conditions on being in inquiry and also has much to say about the attitudes of inquiring and questioning agents, like doubt and suspension of judgment. The account thus provides a framework for determining which questions an agent has open for inquiry and is a starting place for an inquiry-based epistemology. In “Is Suspension an Inquiring State of Mind?,” I put pressure on Jane Friedman’s claim that suspending judgment is sufficient for being in inquiry. While the main force of the argument is critical, the paper unfolds the terrain of the mental states of inquirers and sets the terms in which my own view is framed. “Committing to Inquiry” then is the heart of my account. The project of the paper is to lay out sufficient conditions on an agent’s being in inquiry. I argue that inquiry begins with a commitment to a focal question, this commitment takes the form of an intention, and only such an intention is sufficient for inquiring. Finally, in “Room for Doubt” I explore an application of the picture defended in the previous chapters. I argue that, in my framework, doubt is best understood not as a doxastic attitude but as the process of considering whether to revise one’s belief-commitments. iii Table of Contents 1.! Acknowledgements v 2.! Introduction 1 3.! Chapter 1: Is Suspension an Inquiring State of Mind? 14 4.! Chapter 2: Committing to Inquiry 56 5.! Chapter 3: Room for Doubt 104 iv Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to my committee, Ned Hall, Mark Richard, and Susanna Siegel. Thank you for your encouragement and advice every step of the way. Your insights have shaped these papers in no small part. To Ned, my advisor, a special thanks for your mentorship and support both of this work and in my pedagogical pursuits. I have so valued your insights as a teacher, and I look forward to our future projects. I owe a special thanks to my friend and colleague David. You taught me so much, and many of the ideas in this work are the product of thinking and writing in collaboration with you. And to Zeynep: Thank you for your encouragement and frank advice in the final stages and for all the time you spent reading drafts. To the members of the M&E Workshop: Thank you for your thoughtful comments and discussions of earlier versions of this work. And to my colleagues at the Bok Center, thank you for your encouragement this past summer as I put in the hours writing. The interludes with you reminded me that I had the best motivation to finish. In addition, I am profoundly thankful for family and friends. I love that you’re always there to celebrate my successes. To my dad: Thank you for your love and support always. To my brother Scott and his wife Christine: It encouraged me to know that you were traveling a parallel path. To Anne: There are no words. I can honestly say I would not be here without you. You have made me a better teacher and a better leader. To everyone who has been involved with ThinkerAnalytix: Your excitement kept me invested in the project, and our work together played a key role in my choice of dissertation topic. To Rendi: Thank you for treating me like family and putting up with me over the years. And finally, to the community that is Esh Circus Arts: I will always believe that circus made my dissertation possible. I do my best thinking when I’m spending quality time upside down. v Introduction For the majority of my summers in graduate school, I’ve taught a critical thinking course for high school juniors and seniors. The focus of the course is analyzing arguments. We use visualization methods to make explicit and transparent how all the claims in an argument support or undermine its conclusion. Students often begin the course thinking the material we’re covering is nothing new, and in a sense they’re right. Of course, they make arguments and weigh reasons all the time. But one of my favorite moments is when students discover just how much complexity they take for granted. Most often, this moment is signaled by a quizzical look and an exclamation — “What do we do with this one?!?” When this recognition in turn motivates a student, I know they are going to be successful in the course. There’s something about peeling back the layers of something you took for granted, something you maybe even thought you were good at, and discovering a level you didn’t know existed that’s a recipe for learning. Beyond success in the course, students who make this discovery begin to subject thinking they do every day and discussions they have with their friends to a new level of critical scrutiny. And the new perspective is, if the feedback students give me isn’t just flattery, transformative for many. I tell this story because the project this thesis represents has taken me down a parallel path. The enclosed papers present an account of inquiry from the perspective of philosophy of mind. The account provides sufficient conditions on being in inquiry and also has much to say about the attitudes of inquiring and questioning agents, like doubt and suspension of judgment. But the phenomena that inspired the view are not grand. While the view applies equally to large-scale investigations, my motivation for pursuing this project was to understand the ordinary inquiries we engage in every day. From ‘where did I leave my keys’ 1 when headed out the door in the morning, to ‘what are today’s priorities’ when starting to work, to ‘what’s the best way to get there’ when headed someplace not on our usual itinerary, we constantly update our beliefs by answering questions. Just as we regularly engage in deliberations large and small about what to do, so too we regularly engage in inquiries large and small about what to believe. My account of inquiry has grown out of reflection on these commonplace phenomena of question-answering, and my view has been shaped most by cases where the questions are quotidian rather than momentous. This is where I see myself in the shoes of my students. I’ve come to view an everyday phenomenon through a new critical lens. Through this project, I’ve come to see an activity that I engage in regularly as an essential part of our lives as knowers, as epistemic agents. Which questions we pursue and how well we pursue them has deep impacts on both our epistemic states and our epistemic standing. In brief, my account claims that inquiry is centered around a commitment to a focal question. While an agent may contemplate or wonder about a question at various stages of pre-inquiry, she counts as being in inquiry with respect to that question only when she has made a commitment to settle it. This commitment is not a matter of setting up a mechanism for accountability, but rather, a taking on of the question as an aim or end. Such a commitment, I argue, is best understood as an intention to settle the relevant question. That inquiry begins with an intention explains why we have the sort of voluntary control over inquiry that we do. And the fact that we can, in typical cases, choose when to open or close inquiry positions inquiry as one of the central ways in which we can exercise control over our beliefs. Belief itself may not be voluntary, but if we want to be more certain of something, we can open an inquiry into the matter. 2 Thus, I think we achieve a much more complete picture of agents’ epistemic lives when we take into account not just what they believe or know but also which questions they have open for inquiry. An account of inquiry is important philosophically not only because it explains a mechanism by which we maintain and modify our beliefs but because it broadens our understanding of what it is to do well as an epistemic agent. The exemplary epistemic agent, we might think, not only has justified beliefs but is conducting inquiries into the right questions and conducting those inquiries well.